Russia plans low-tech fake drug crackdown

The Russian Duma is planning to debate a new drug law in the fall that would "ban the flow of medicines into retail without using technologies that protect medicines from counterfeiting," according to Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov.

His statement was supported by Veniamin Monblit, research director at Comcon, the Moscow-based market research firm, who said: "the equipment for manufacturing medicine is expensive and complex. It cannot be installed at a dacha or in some shed." Mr Monblit added that eliminating the threat of counterfeits was "absolutely not a matter of technology."

Because the Russian government's approach is to consider that fake drugs are often produced on the same assembly lines that manufacture legitimate products, it believes that special labels, similar to those recently introduced in Russia for alcoholic drinks, are the only realistic identifiers, given that providing pharmacies with the equipment to employ sophisticated tracking or tagging is logistically unrealistic at the present time.