Nov 7, 2007 7:25 pm US/Eastern
What's In The Bottle? Your Pharmacy Might Not Know
Prescription Drug Counterfeiting A Tough Crime To Catch
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
You buy your prescription drugs from a reputable pharmacy with the belief that the medicine in the bottle is exactly what the doctor ordered. But buyer beware: neither you, nor your pharmacy, nor the government has any way of being certain it is.
Long Island native Tim Fagan, now 22, had a liver transplant at the age of 16. His father, Kevin, was relieved when doctors pronounced the operation a success.
"It was such an emotional rollercoaster to go through," the elder Fagan said.
After the transplant, Tim was prescribed Epogen to boost his red blood cell count. His father got the medication, not over the Internet or through a discount supply house, but from their local CVS pharmacy. What they didn't know, nor expected, was that the drugs were counterfeit.
His father said that one night Tim woke up from a sound sleep, screaming in pain.
"It was an indescribable pain. It was the worst thing I've ever been through," said Tim.
Tim continued to suffer those symptoms for eight weeks until it came to light that the Epogen was at fault.
"I was enraged. I felt like my son was victimized," Kevin said.
Investigators eventually discovered that a lot of Epogen has traveled from the manufacturer through 11 different distributors, including a Miami strip club, until being illegally relabeled as a higher dosage in a Florida trailer park.
Katherine Eban, author of "Dangerous Doses," a book about counterfeit drugs, says the counterfeiting can happen because pharmaceutical companies prefer to make large bulk sales.
"What they would rather do is unload all their drugs to a big distributor and have them deal with the logistics of reselling them," said Eban.
New York Congressman Steve Israel has proposed a law to keep an eye on where the drugs go.
"There is a huge black market which is why 40 million prescriptions in America today are counterfeit, have been tainted, been contaminated," said Israel (D-N.Y.). "It's a stealth killer."
But right now, from the moment the manufacturer sells the drugs to wholesalers, there's virtually no record of who has it or what they've done to it until it ends up in your pharmacy.
Tim Fagan calls it the perfect crime.
"You're sick. You're not getting any better, and you blame it on your illness, your disease, as opposed to the medication," he said.
The World Health Organizations estimates counterfeit drugs are a $32 billion criminal enterprise involving 10 percent of all drugs worldwide.
There is a U.S. law on the books since 1988 mandating every drug shipment be tracked from manufacturer to end user, but the pharmaceutical industry has successfully blocked the FDA's enforcement of it in court. CVS however, the pharmacy chain that sold the Fagan's their Epogen, now only buys directly from the manufacturer.
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