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Drug Busters: Tracking Down Counterfeiters

Novartis deploys a global team to track down counterfeit drugs and help authorities prosecute counterfeiters.

November 01, 2005 — CSO — Laid out on a conference room table at Novartis's headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, is a pile of pills. Pills to treat asthma, erectile dysfunction and diarrhea spill out of boxes labeled with well-known names of over-the-counter, prescription and generic drugs from around the world. The kinds of medicines people take

every day to cure their sickness or make them feel better.

But these particular drugs don't do either of those things. They're fakes.

Counterfeit medicines are a global scourge. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that as much as 10 percent of the half-trillion-dollar pharmaceutical market is counterfeit. In some developing countries, more than half of the drug supply may be fake. Every year, thousands die from ingesting fake medicines, many of which have been produced in squalid conditions using ingredients such as boric acid and highway paint.

To give an idea of the stark contrast between how genuine and counterfeit drugs are producedand why Novartis CSO James T. Christian and his security team travel the world to fight the spread of this problemour story begins at a manufacturing plant in Stein, Switzerland. There, about 40 kilometers from Novartis headquarters, is a factory that employs more than 1,400 workers and produces 2,500 different product dosages, including cardiovascular, transplant and cancer drugs, totaling 1,300 tons a year. Before Andrew Jackson, executive director and deputy head of corporate security, and this reporter are allowed into the manufacturing area, our guide politely hands us a set of pale blue sterile uniforms, from hats to booties.

Inside glass-enclosed rooms, glimmering stainless-steel machines clean and fill vials with various medicines. Technicians dressed in sterile garb peer through instruments and fill out paperwork. Remote-controlled platforms on wheels whisk boxes of medicines to their next destination, in preparation for shipping. As we wander along the halls and take in the enormity of a large-scale pharmaceutical operation, I find myself trying to hold back a lingering cough, for fear of exhaling a flurry of germs into the pristine air of the surgical-room-like environment.

Things aren't quite the same in Bogota. Back in a Basel conference room, Jackson pops a DVD into his laptop to show a grainy video in which a convicted Colombian drug counterfeiter, a former glass blower and engraver, describes in detail how he fakes a well-known pain relief drug.

In a filthy-looking, dark room on a table covered with newspapers and paint cans, he pulls a vial out of a box, and, using a sheet of acetate, applies a computer-scanned label to the outside of the glass. Next, he rolls the vial along a taut No. 3 guitar string, stretched between two blocks and moistened with paint, to apply a series of thin, colored bands. After stirring a mixture of powder (which has some active ingredient of the real drug in the mix) and distilled water with a wooden spoon, he fills a syringe with the counterfeit solution, empties it into the vial and seals it. Voilàcounterfeit medicine, ready for immediate delivery into the underground drug supply chain. Its final destination: an unwitting patient, likely poor, who will ingest a substance made under abhorrently unsanitary conditions that, instead of bringing relief, might make the recipient sicker.