meds is not only testing your patience, it’s compromising the value of Big Pharma’s most prominent brands. According to MarkMonitor’s Irfan Salim:“Caveat emptor on the part of consumers is not a sufficient response to the depredations of online scammers and thieves. The data show brandjackers are profoundly exploiting brands, using increasingly sophisticated tactics, and, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, posing an outright danger to consumers through questionable practices that indicate counterfeiting and gray markets."
MarkMonitor’s findings are not that shocking given that the problem of drug counterfeiting is glaringly obvious to anyone who spends a nanosecond working in the pharmaceutical industry. While protecting the brand is certainly important, MarkMonitor has it right. A much bigger problem is that consumers are using online pharmacies and paying the ultimate price. A few months ago a woman based in Canada, Marcia Bergeron, died after taking medicine she purchased online. According to the National Review of Medicine:
“[Bergeron] had been visiting websites that sold unlicensed pharmaceuticals — the kind you often see advertised in spam emails. . . . The drugs Ms Bergeron bought online were counterfeits; they were manufactured poorly and contained impure "filler" materials. It's since become apparent that the filler was likely contaminated by dangerous metals during production in Southeast Asia and sold by a website based in Eastern Europe, possibly the Czech Republic”
As it turns out counterfeiting and the importation of dangerous products from places like China are shaking the confidence of Americans – seemingly on a weekly basis. Shockingly, toothpaste containing a dangerous chemical wound up in hotel bathrooms and store shelves.
MarkMonitor’s study, Bergeron’s untimely death and the flood of dangerous products from China should be enough to give proponents of drug reimportation pause. We’ve got to do a better job protecting the food and OTC drug supplies before we get into the tricky area of pharmaceuticals.
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