Counterfeiting ethical drugs is a heinous crime

Southeast Asia is awash in counterfeit medications, none more insidious than those for malaria, a deadly infectious disease that is usually curable if treated early with appropriate drugs. Pharmacies throughout the region are stocked with the fake malaria medicine...

"This is a very, very serious criminal act," Nicholas White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, says of the counterfeiting. "You're killing people. It's premeditated, coldblooded murder. And yet we don't think of it like that."

Bogus medicines are by no means limited to malaria or Southeast Asia; business is booming in India, Africa and Latin America. The New York City-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest estimates that the global trade in fake pharmaceuticals—including treatments for malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS—will reach $75 billion a year in 2010. In developing countries, corruption among government officials and police officers, along with weak border controls, allow counterfeiters to ply their trade with relative impunity. Counterfeiting is "a relatively high-profit and risk-free venture... Very few people are sent to jail for dealing in fake anti-infectives."

...analysts also found safrole, a carcinogenic precursor to MDMA—better known as the illicit narcotic Ecstasy. The traces of safrole suggested that the same criminals who produced party drugs were now producing fake antimalarials.

Making matters worse, some of the bogus pills contained small amounts of genuine artesunate—possibly an effort to foil authenticity tests—which could cause the malaria parasite, spread by mosquitoes, to develop resistance to the leading drug treatment for the disease in Southeast Asia...

The full story is in the October issue of Smithsonian magazine.