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The Terrible Human Cost of Counterfeit Medicine In this four minute documentary, Carrie Luther, who lost her son to counterfeit medicine, and former FDA Office of Criminal Investigations director George Karavetsos talk about the human costs that people so often gloss over when discussing drug importation. Drug Importation Endangers U.S. Patients The United States already has a counterfeit medicine problem.…
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Counterfeit medicines kill up to 300,000 children each year In a shocking new report published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers have documented the true toll of counterfeit medicines around the world due to medicine being subtherapeutic or outright ineffective. Subtherapeutic medicine allows patients to die without sufficient treatment, but it also creates treatment resistant…
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The editorial board of the The Wall Street Journal published this editorial on April 15, 2019. In it, they write:
“The argument that drug importation threatens the integrity of the drug supply is often dismissed because pharmaceutical lobbyists make it. But keeping the drug supply free from contaminated or counterfeit products is not easy, and the World Health Organization has warned that 1 in 10 medical products in the developing world are phony. It isn’t clear who is liable if counterfeits are found in Florida, but you can bet it won’t be the politicians.”
Read MoreSPEAK UP: Tell the Maine legislature that we need real progress on healthcare costs, not fantasy policy like Canadian importation You can use our helpful letter writing tool to write an email to your legislators which will be sent directly to them.
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April 12, 2019 (Tallahassee, FL) — Importation undermines our core efforts to keep our medicine supply safe. State and federal authorities regulate every entity in the U.S. supply chain from the point of manufacture until a medicine is dispensed, and that makes counterfeits in the legitimate supply chain rare. In 2013, Congress passed the Drug Supply Chain Security Act to…
Read MoreWhat’s happening? The Florida legislature is currently considering two bills, HB 19 and SB 1528, that would open up the drug supply to drugs not inspected by the FDA and not protected by the Track and Trace system. As fake medicines made with fentanyl are flooding into America and in Florida, we cannot afford to weaken safety of the drug…
Read MoreWhat’s happening? The Colorado legislature is working through proposals to lower healthcare costs which is important, as healthcare costs are a challenge to many Colorado residents of all kinds. Of the thirteen proposals being discussed, one of them sacrifices safety to achieve cost savings: foreign drug importation. This proposal opens up Colorado to the risk of counterfeits which are a…
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In March 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warning letters to a website and an online pharmacy network for selling misbranded mifepristone and misoprostol
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In this editorial, which was published in The Gadsden Times on April 11, 2019, former FDA-OCI director George Karavetsos points out the real dangers of drug importation:
“Even today, Americans are being hurt and even dying because of counterfeit medications being imported into this country. Adding insult to injury, while some might point to Canada as being a safe source, counterfeit medications are transshipped through Canada from other countries in remote corners of the globe.”
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The News and Record has reported about a North Carolina resident, Yazid Al Fayyad Finn, who was arrested in 2018 for his part in a plot to steal a 200 pound shipment of counterfeit Xanax that was being smuggled across the Quebec-Vermont border.
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