Katherine Eban on The Open Mind: The Helpless U.S. in the Global Pervasiveness of Fraudulent Drugs

On this week's episode of The Open Mind, investigative reporter Katherine Eban discusses pharmaceutical counterfeiting. Eban uncovered the comprehensive picture of how under-policed generic companies operate for Fortune Magazine. As she writes, “It’s not a tale of cutting corners or lax manufacturing practices, but one of outright fraud in which the company knowingly sells substandard drugs around the world including in the US, while working to deceive regulators.”
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In this episode of The Open Mind, we discuss how the high cost of medication in the United States has led us into the arms of foreign powers to produce low-cost generic drugs. Big Pharma companies have become experts in how to fraudulently market drugs and alter data in manufacturing labs. Yet, top executives are not put in jail. The FDA, originally set up as a domestic agency, finds itself tasked with becoming a global policeman of foreign manufacturing plants. Ill-equipped for this responsibility, overseas manufacturing plants often end up fooling the FDA to gain approval for drugs that don’t actually work. While the impact on patients will likely never be known, it’s clear that millions of people worldwide got medicine of dubious quality.
What do we need to do to start tackling worldwide drug counterfeiting? Eban argues that the United States can start by regulating drug prices to take some of the profit and heat out of the pharma marketplace, releasing us from the arms of low-cost drug makers in developing countries like India and China. Bringing drug production back to the United States can be pricey, but Eban believes we are a couple of scandals away from widespread awareness in terms of drug pricing. Eban suggests that we need a consumer revolution to spark change, and stresses the importance of remaining persistent throughout our unusual news cycles, holding onto and pushing through important issues.