Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade champions greater cooperation between wealthy and poor nations to quash the trade in counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Bate calls for fortified policing resources, harsher penalties for counterfeiters, widespread public education, and commonsense consumer vigilance against this danger. Western policymakers must act immediately to quell the deadly counterfeit market in developing countries--and to ensure the integrity of their products at home. (Amazon.com)

Introduction:
The Second-Oldest Profession

As long as people have been in the business of inventing, others have been in the business of faking their inventions. Counterfeiting has played a role in padding business profits, waging war, defrauding governments, and undermining currencies. Today, fake medicines are harming health and impeding pharmaceutical innovation.

Documents from the second century BC tell the story of a Gallic winemaker who tried to pass off cheap local wine as a much finer Italian vintage. Most wines were transported in clay jars, and merchants would make an imprint on the stopper to indicate the wine’s origin and quality. The unschooled Gaul made his own stopper to resemble those of more established wines. But his plan had one major flaw: He could neither read nor write.

Instead of marking the name of a recognized Italian winemaker, he settled for a few indecipherable characters. The merchant’s clay stopper now sits in a glass case at the Union des Fabricants’s Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, an example of one of the world’s first knockoffs.

A faker will exploit every possibility. In 1690, Thomas and Anne Rogers were executed in England for clipping the edges off of forty pieces of silver to make new coins from them. Punishment for counterfeiting was severe. Thomas was hanged, drawn, and quartered; Anne was burned alive.

In the United States in the early eighteenth century, lax control of the money supply led many people to attempt to counterfeit money. Mary Peck Butterworth, a homemaker in rural Massachusetts, used a hot iron, a piece of cloth, and a quill pen to create counterfeit versions of colonial currency.3 Later, during the Revolutionary War, the British used counterfeiting strategically. British soldiers flooded the American market with so much counterfeit cash that the continental became worthless—the origin of the phrase “not worth a continental.”

The most famous American printer, Benjamin Franklin, was acutely aware of the damage counterfeiters could do. He printed detailed pictures of leaves on his currency that were too complex to fake easily. He also printed the slogan “To Counterfeit Is Death” on each of his notes—an expression more of frustration than fact. ...

Download Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade

PDF format, 458KB, 116Pages.

Paperback: 120 pages
Author: Roger Bate
Publisher: AEI Press (June 25, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0844742643
ISBN-13: 978-0844742649

Visit Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade Download Page

About the Author:

Roger Bate is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He researches aid policy in Africa and the developing world, evaluating the performance and effectiveness of the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, NGOs, and other aid organizations and development policy initiatives.

He writes extensively on topics such as endemic diseases in developing countries (malaria, HIV/AIDS); access and innovation in pharmaceuticals; taxes and tariffs; water policy; and international health agreements.

Mr. Bate’s writings have appeared in the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, among other pubications. In the process of writing Making a Killing, Mr. Bate conducted extensive research in India and numerous African countries.

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