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The Partnership for Safe Medicines has been publishing information about the counterfeit drug problem around the world for more than a decade. With experts leading the organization and a committed and passionate set of writers and editors, our content is more in-depth than many other sources, which simply copy links to the news from other websites.
The recent prosecution of Jorge Nogueira and Jessyka Molina for selling counterfeit Botox wholesale highlights one of Florida’s biggest counterfeit drug problems: fake beauty injections. This is the third action against fake beauty injections in Florida in the last year.
ASOP Global and LegitScript released a report analyzing the prevalence of illicit online sales of prescription drugs in China, a country where such sales are prohibited. Their analysis showed that about half of all Chinese online pharmaceuticals sellers are illicit, potentially exposing patients to counterfeit medicines, substandard medicines, financial fraud, and identity theft…
Blain Padgett earned a full athletic scholarship and a defensive end position with the Rice University Owls in 2015 through persistence, vision and sheer hard work, but his dream of playing college football was cut short on March 2, 2018, when he was found dead in his apartment. Investigation showed that Blain’s cause of death was fentanyl poisoning: the hydrocodone pill he’d taken from a friend for his shoulder pain turned out to be a counterfeit laced with carfentanil.
On September 30th, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a joint warning to four online networks that were operating a total of ten fake online pharmacy websites. While all four networks were offering misbranded/counterfeit opioid medications such as tramadol and Soma for sale, three of the online networks had marketplaces offering misbranded medications to treat a kaleidoscope of ailments, such as allergies, cancer, smoking, asthma, and infection.
In case you missed it, Bloomberg’s Ben Elgin has published an “in-depth” piece on the connection between PhRMA and the Partnership for Safe Medicines. However, this has been public and widely reported on for years. More concerningly, the story misses the broader point about the clear safety concerns of foreign drug importation. Over the past…
Eric Highsmith Griffin of Lexington, South Carolina died of fentanyl poisoning on May 10, 2016 after taking a Xanax for anxiety. He had no way of knowing that the medicine he had purchased from a friend of a friend was not just like the medicine he’d been prescribed. He would never have risked his life or caused suffering to his children and family if he had known that a non-opioid anti-anxiety medication could really be a counterfeit poison pill.
GL Holdings is voluntarily recalling six lots of Green Lumber 2-, 4-, and 10-capsule packages purchased on or before August 10, 2019 to the consumer level. FDA analysis has found one lot of Green Lumber distributed between June and August 2019 to be tainted with tadalafil.
On March 11, 2018, 20-year-old Jaydon Rogers died after he ingested a counterfeit oxycodone pill made with fentanyl. Recently, one of the men who helped put that pill into his hand received a sentence of 128 months in federal prison…
On September 30th, the Public Health Department of Santa Clara County, California updated a public health warning they had issued September 10th about deadly counterfeit 30mg oxycodone pills. The initial warning described “tablets visually appear to be the pharmaceutically manufactured version—they are circular in shape, light blue to light green in color, and have an ‘M’ inside a square stamped on one side and a ‘30’ stamped on the other side. Numerous fatal overdoses have been tied to these tablets, with a strong uptick in fatal overdoses in August 2019.”
This editorial by Ryan Costello was published in The Philadelphia Enquirer on October 9, 2019. Mr. Costello is a former U.S. Congressman (PA-06), and is now a public policy consultant.