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A 47-year-old Houston woman appeared in federal court in June 2017 to face charges for allegedly smuggling a counterfeit drug into the U.S. and trafficking it through her weight loss and nutrition store located in a west Houston strip mall.
Read MoreDon’t let unlicensed foreign pharmacies dispense in Texas! (Don’t live in Texas? Write a letter to your own Senators here.) Congress thinks letting unlicensed foreign pharmacies without licensed pharmacists or pharmacy techs dispense in Texas is a great money-saving idea. It’s a dangerous and foolish idea. 22 U.S. Senators think that letting patients order medications from unlicensed foreign pharmacies is…
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A new survey conducted by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) has found that a majority of Americans are in the dark when it comes to dangers posed by unlicensed online pharmacies.
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Cincinnati resident Shoaib Haroon was recently sentenced to five years in federal prison for his role in a scheme to sell people counterfeit drugs. Mr. Haroon received and filled the orders out of his home. He was observed mailing 80 packages each day out of the same post office. Inside the packages were counterfeit pills in plastic bags.
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The National Post reports that since October 2015, Health Canada has stopped almost 10,000 packages containing counterfeit prescription drugs at the Canadian border. New reports from a 2010 incident reveal that counterfeit drugs ended up in 260 pharmacies and four hospitals in Australia. Patients were protected by a thorough hospital pharmacist who noticed “it was grittier than normal.”
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Counterfeit Altuzan, known as Avastin in the U.S., resurfaces in Cyprus and India four years after FDA reported U.S. doctors purchasing it.
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This editorial by Aliyah N. Horton, the executive director of the Maryland Pharmacists Association, was published in the Baltimore Sun on July 19, 2017.
In it, Horton points out the “huge public health risk” posed by buying imported drugs, and urges legislators to vote against unsafe drug importation, and to “seek other avenues to improve patient access, safety and drug affordability.”
Read MoreShould unlicensed pharmacies or unlicensed pharmacy staff be allowed to dispense in your state? Sen. Bernie Sanders and several other Senators are pushing legislation to allow unlicensed foreign fake pharmacies to dispense in America. (S469) These foreign pharmacies aren’t required to have U.S. pharmacy licenses or U.S. licensed pharmacists or pharmacy techs. Furthermore if they sell counterfeit medication to America, it…
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Freeh warned that allowing drug importation from Canada was akin to allowing drugs to be imported from anywhere. Quality would be at risk, and the opioid crisis, an epidemic that killed over 33,000 Americans in 2015, would only get worse. He said that allowing drug importation, “…will not only fuel that, but it will also, in my opinion, encourage a lot of criminal groups and organizations that heretofore have not been involved in this trade, but will see huge opportunities to enter the market.”
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In a July 14, 2017 editorial for STAT, Jim Greenwood, the president and CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), reminds us that the safety risks of buying prescription medicines from other countries are real:
“The debate about drug importation has been underway for decades. Those who support it have never advanced a responsible plan that would provide the same level of health and safety protections that the FDA has delivered for decades. Its rigorous system of rules and protocols ensure that prescription drugs in this country are safe and effective. It protects those high standards by preventing the sale of imported prescription drugs that are not approved for use in the U.S.”
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