Quarterly press review october to december 2016
Not a week goes by without news on a seizure of illicit medical products, the discovery of a clandestine laboratory or the dismantling of a criminal network involved in the traffic of fake medicines. Even some TV series have taken up the subject!
Africa, Southeast Asia and South America are more than ever the number one targets of the traffickers, but at the same time more steps are being taken to protect consumers. The authorities in the southwest of Pakistan closed over 350 outlets of illicit medicines in 2016. On 22 November last year, the Nigerian government destroyed thousands of counterfeit medicines with a commercial value of nearly US$600,000. The sale of medicines in markets will be forbidden as of 1 August 2017. The veterinary authorities in Togo are campaigning to clean up the veterinary medicine market by seizing fake veterinary products in markets and closing down illicit sales outlets. In Peru, two tonnes of counterfeit, falsified and out-of-date medicines were seized in a shopping mall mid-December during a joint intervention by the police and the General Directorate of Medicines. They were mainly antibiotics, analgesics, anti-inflammatories and medicines to treat cancer, diabetes and Parkinson disease, but also contraceptives, sold clandestinely and stored in bad conditions in the mall.
But North America and western countries are in no way exempt. U.S. and Canada are facing more and more cases of overdosing on counterfeit fentanyl-based painkillers and anxiolytics: over a thousand people died in 2016. In Switzerland, over 3,000 counterfeit pills to treat erectile dysfunction were seized in November and December on buses arriving from Serbia!
No population and no government can claim to be spared from the traffic of fake medicines, even in Europe, because of the profits to be gained by organised crime networks, particularly from parallel imports and online sales. In Germany, customs seized almost 4 million illicit pills in 2015 – four times more than in 2014.
As long as trafficking of fake medicines remains much more profitable and far less risky than drug smuggling or prostitution, it will continue to spread worldwide. We are facing unscrupulous dealers, who are very familiar with the legal loopholes and know that nothing is currently being done to trace them. In the absence of effective international cooperation like the ones working to sanction drug trafficking, magistrates have no means of dismantling the networks, or of locating and freezing the criminals’ financial assets. That is why at IRACM we support the introduction of specific model laws aimed at better combating the fake medicine trade. We are also actively involved in training agents working on the ground: in 2016 we trained or educated over 1,600 people face to face.
Now for the good news: WHO may soon be simplifying the definition of fake medicine. The five English terms used (substandard, spurious, falsely-labelled, falsified and counterfeit – or SSFFC) are to be replaced by two (substandard and falsified). Substandard medicines would refer to all authorised medicines that do not meet their specifications or the quality standards in force; falsified medicines would cover all medicines whose identity, composition or origin are deliberately misleading (the notion of intellectual property is another issue). These proposed new definitions shall be adopted by the WHO Executive Council in May 2017.
More than ever before, we count on your support and commitment to eradicate this scourge.
Bernard LEROY
Director of IRACM
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