Counterfeit medicines: the pills that kill
The multi-billion-pound global trade in bogus medicines is responsible for an estimated half a million deaths a year. As Europe becomes an ever-more lucrative target for counterfeiters, Eric Clark meets the government agents and pharmaceutical company investigators who are taking the fight to the fakers
Half an hour before dawn, the semi-detached house, like the rest of the silent East Midlands town, is in darkness. Two investigators, search warrant at the ready, approach the front door, while a man with a battering ram takes up position. There has already been a 6am briefing session at the local police station, and the raid has a code name - Operation Mexico.
But the investigators about to move into the house are not police officers. They belong to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) intelligence and enforcement unit, a small specialist group that seeks to keep Britain free of illegal and counterfeit medicines - a multi-billion-pound worldwide trade that is estimated to lead directly to the deaths of more than a half million people a year across the globe.
Today’s target is the man behind a website, ostensibly based in Belize but in reality located in this nondescript house and an office in a small modern block a few minutes away. Malik (not his real name), the intelligence officer on the operation, has already made a purchase on the site, buying Kamagra, an Indian version of Viagra, illegal in the UK, using a bogus credit card and phoney mail address to hide his real identity.
‘You never know what you are going to find behind closed doors,’ Stan, the lead investigator, says. Other recent MHRA raids have uncovered everything from rudimentary machines for pressing baking powder and shoe polish into fake pills to so-called ‘miracle cancer cures’.
Fake pharmaceutical drugs - whether sold directly over the internet or infiltrated into the neighbourhood pharmacy or local hospitals - have become a huge and fast-increasing threat. In 2005, 500,000 single doses of fake medicines were discovered across Europe. The following year that number had shot up to 2.5 million.
Worldwide, according to figures collected by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, customs seized more than three million counterfeit or suspected counterfeit tablets in more than 1,000 separate actions in the two years up to January.
Counterfeit medicines are easy to produce, low risk and vastly profitable. A drug costing a fraction of a penny can be sold for 50 times as much and more. In one MHRA case, 100,000 fake tablets supplied by a Chinese manufacturer for about 25p each were being sold for up to £20 each in the UK, worth £1.6 million in total.
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