Morning Briefing

"The worldwide counterfeit drug market is huge and growing," Tim Mackey and Brian Liang of the Institute of Health Law Studies at the California Western School of Law and Thomas Kubic of the Pharmaceutical Security Institute write in a Foreign Policy opinion piece, noting such "drugs occupy a wide spectrum of medications, and their quality is suspect; they can be mislabeled, tainted, adulterated, ineffective, or, in the worst cases, all of the above." They argue for a new framework for fighting the illegal drug trade because "[g]lobal policy has not kept up with the burgeoning counterfeit drug trade." The authors say that although initial results of the WHO IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeit Taskforce) are "encouraging," they note that "[s]ome WHO member states, including India and Brazil (both top producers of generic drugs) and other developing countries, have questioned whether WHO can rightly take on enforcement operations" because it "is not a global law enforcement agency."