Panel 1: Alex Dahl, Coalition for Patient Safety and Medicine Integrity

Alex Dahl, Coalition for Patient Safety and Medicine Integrity, spoke first at the "Protecting Our Medicines" panel about cargo theft, and the stealing of medicines out of the legitimate supply chain.

What is the crime problem?  Large, sophisiticated criminal organizations are taking methodical stpes to steal medicines from cargo, and then reintroduce them into the legitimate supply chain.  

Why is this a problem?  Most of the sophisticated, expensive medications require careful control of temperature in order to maintain their efficacy.

Criminals are focusing on biologics, like cancer and diabetes medications, that are very sensitive to temperature.  Unfortunately the medications, in liquid form, look like clear liquid whether or not they've been subject to high temperature and rendered ineffectual.  It's a perfect crime: the medications can't be verified by sight as being damaged by heat, but they are no longer effective.

How do criminals take cargo?  They steal trucks from rest stops, strip out GPS info, repaint trucks, and then put them in hiding until the "heat is off."  However, while hiding, the heat is on the medicines in the hidden trucks.

According to Freightwatch the value of the average theft of medical products has grown  by 3 fold over the past four years.  

Criminals are sophisticated enough to use "Mission Impossible" type methods, including cutting holes in roofs and rappelling into pharmaceutical warehouses to pick and chose high value and fragile medicines for theft.  The medications stolen in this method are not easily traced, and some are still outstanding. In other cases, lot numbers have been found in up to 17 different states from similar thefts.

While industry tries to increase the protection of the products, the criminal statutes don't address the patient safety concerns of these crimes, and address basic cargo theft, which has an average sentence of 1 year.  Given the sophisitication of the criminal organizations behind the thefts, this low sentence does not give prosecutors bargaining opportunities to unravel the criminal organizations when a truck thief is caught.

The Coalition for Patient Safety and Medicine Integrity is seeking to increase the penalties for medicine cargo theft through the "Safe Doses Act" in order to provide tools to bring down organized crime involved in medicine diversion.   The Safe Doses Act was introduced by Senator Schumer and Senator Kyl but it has not yet been passed.