A Prescription for Pharmaceuticals
RFID could help reduce counterfeiting and improve patient safety, but the costs are high and there are technological and privacy hurdles to overcome.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
June 1, 2005—A customer became suspicious after buying a few bottles of Viagra, the leading treatment for erectile dysfunction, from a Glendale, Calif., pharmacy in June 2004. The labels on the bottles looked slightly off-color, and the logo was odd. After breaking open a tablet, the customer found unusual blue speckles inside; real Viagra tablets have a light blue coating on the outside and are solid white in the center. Tests by Viagra's manufacturer, Pfizer, headquartered in New York City, confirmed that the tablets were fake.
For Pfizer, the stakes were tremendous. Viagra has a 70 percent worldwide market share in its class of prescription drugs, which amounted to $1.68 billion in sales in 2004. So far this year, authorities around the world have confiscated several million counterfeit tablets. The growing illegal trade in knockoff Viagra by unregulated Internet pharmacies, organized crime and overseas bootleggers—which often beckon consumers through unsolicited e-mail—poses potential risks to customer health.
And that was a risk Pfizer couldn't measure in dollars and cents. The company announced in November that it would start adding RFID tags to cases and packaging of Viagra as part of a multipronged, multimillion-dollar anticounterfeiting campaign. It also filed suit against online dealers it claims are peddling fake Viagra.
June 1, 2005—A customer became suspicious after buying a few bottles of Viagra, the leading treatment for erectile dysfunction, from a Glendale, Calif., pharmacy in June 2004. The labels on the bottles looked slightly off-color, and the logo was odd. After breaking open a tablet, the customer found unusual blue speckles inside; real Viagra tablets have a light blue coating on the outside and are solid white in the center. Tests by Viagra's manufacturer, Pfizer, headquartered in New York City, confirmed that the tablets were fake.
For Pfizer, the stakes were tremendous. Viagra has a 70 percent worldwide market share in its class of prescription drugs, which amounted to $1.68 billion in sales in 2004. So far this year, authorities around the world have confiscated several million counterfeit tablets. The growing illegal trade in knockoff Viagra by unregulated Internet pharmacies, organized crime and overseas bootleggers—which often beckon consumers through unsolicited e-mail—poses potential risks to customer health.
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