Interchange 2014 Highlights: Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood Speaks Fights Counterfeits at the State Level
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who has made significant contributions to state-based efforts to protect Americans from counterfeit products, offered an attorney general’s perspective on working collaboratively with Federal agencies to fight counterfeit medicines.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who has made significant contributions to state-based efforts to protect Americans from counterfeit products, was the first keynote speaker at PSM’s 2014 Interchange. “By following up aggressively on all claims involving counterfeits,” said PSM treasurer Tom Kubic, who introduced A.G. Hood, “Attorney General Hood has done something new and he showed us that the fight to protect consumers against counterfeit drugs is not just a Federal responsibility…Were the other 49 state attorney generals equally engaged in the fight against counterfeits, I believe the landscape would look significantly different today.”
Hood offered an attorney general’s perspective on working collaboratively with Federal agencies to fight counterfeit medicines and spoke about confronting other illicit trade in his state. He also recounted the efforts of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) to discourage the sale of black market medicines by pressuring the industries that create the infrastructure that supports the counterfeit drug trade. NAAG has been particularly successful in persuading banks to stop processing payments for fake drug distributors and continues to pressure companies such as Google, whose search engines lead consumers to dangerous fake online pharmacies, to be good corporate citizens:
They say, “you come tell us what you find out there.” They want the government to carry the water for them. They want us in law enforcement to go out here and patrol everything they put up on the internet and tell them what’s wrong. Well, it doesn’t work that way. You know, they have a responsibility.
Watch Attorney General Hood’s keynote in its entirely:
Read about Google and illegal online pharmacies:
Google Settles With Shareholders, Agrees To Set Up $250 Million Internal Program To Weed Out Fake Online Pharmacy Advertising (August 27, 2014)
Mississippi Attorney General Targets Google in Illicit Drug Ad Crackdown (July 31, 2014)
24 State Attorney Generals Talk with Google About Protecting Consumers from Fake Online Pharmacies (April 28, 2014)