Health security

The Fake Drug Industry Is Exploding, and We Can’t Do Anything About It

Task forces are finding more fake drugs every year. Interpol’s flagship pharmaceutical investigation, Operation Pangea, for example, says it seized 2.4 million fake and illicit pills in 2011; in 2015, the total number of pills and other medications that officials seized jumped to 20.7 million.

That’s either good news or a terrible harbinger of what’s to come. It might be the case that officials finally know where to look for fakes and are just now catching up to the crooks. Though public health officials have known about falsified pharmaceuticals for decades, they didn’t understand the extent of the catastrophe until they started collecting data in the early 2000. Interpol’s pharmaceutical crime unit wasn’t even founded until 2005.