Counterfeiting or rise in price of medicines - Ministry of Health of Russia made its choice

The theme of counterfeit medicines is perhaps the most exciting for our people. This I can judge, including on your questions, coming in Directory. If the medicine did not help the first thing that our person asks - is it not a fake? It took so long ago that expensive drugs in Russia forged and continue to forge and sell all sorts of unscrupulous dealers.

And this can be a relatively good fake, when a factory in Russia, bypassing the payment of taxes and fees, produces so-called unaccounted for. That is, this usual medicine is not worse than produced legally, but without documents. Here businessmen are driven by greed for profit and harm is applied only to the state and its institutions, but not to the person. But there are clandestine shops where the true counterfeit is stamped, or does not affect the patient's health (dummy), or contains harmful substances,which use as original substances original products that mimic the color and taste of the original and which can undermine the health of a sick person. For the last kind I would punish strictly, because even a dummy is not so safe, because delay in the treatment of some diseases puts an end to the possibility of their complete cure and leads to the chronic illness, and the addition of harmful substances is considered deliberate killing. A forgery of medicines for children ... Here in general the punishment should be the strictest.

Relatively long ago, the Ministry of Health announced the development of a project of a system for controlling the circulation of medicines in Russia, in the implementation of which the risk of buying counterfeit drugs would have been reduced to zero. The essence of the development is reduced to the labeling of drug packages with a unique bar code and the maintenance of a special register of medicines that have been imported or imported from abroad.

The barcode marking is still present, but when it is static, it is not difficult to apply the same on packages with counterfeit goods and instead of selling one thousand boxes, which is being done at the moment. And the registry will be more difficult.

The essence of the new system is that each package of the drug will have its own unique number entered into the register at the stage of production or importation into the territory of our country and it will be clear who, when it produced or imported the drug into Russia and when (and probably where ) it was sold. That is, in the given system of two identical packages basically can not be, and if and will be - to trace it it is simple. Each pharmacy will be obliged to equip with scanners of similar bar codes, so that anyone can check the purchased packaging for originality. It is also planned to develop a mobile application to control purchased medicines on the part of the population, since new phones have scanners for barcode reading, and synchronize the information read with the register with the matter of technology.

Such a system is much more interesting than the current one, when it is possible to reliably determine a fake or not, sometimes even a pharmacy network can not. Yes, you can request originals of certificates and other documents for the consignment of medicines at the place of sale, because for the forgery of documents comes the criminal responsibility and not many will put themselves like this.Therefore, small pharmacies sell medicines without any documents and the issue of quality can be solved simply by asking the pharmacist or the seller to have the documents for the lot (a copy is acceptable). But 100% guarantee of buying the original is still not there. If the price of the drug is very expensive, the manufacturer-dealer bundle may well go to all serious and forge all components along the chain, because the margin is large and will cover all possible risks. So, plus the planned to introduce a new model is obvious.

There is also a minus sign in the present realities - the cost of organizing this system. Judging by how many people want to create and manage the registry of medicines - the case promises to be profitable. Plus the equipment of drugstores, pharmaceutical factories and factories with special systems of drawing, accounting of bar codes for packages with medicines. All this requires investments. It is clear that the business will not itself cover these losses, but shift it to the final buyer, that is, to us with you. According to recent calculations, the introduction of a new control system will increase the cost of drugs by about 3%. On the one hand, the amount is considerable given the current state of the population's incomes,on the other hand, one package of expensive counterfeit is more than offset by a similar rise in price, and harm or benefit to human health in general are priceless. I would like to have such a system for free, but in the modern world this does not happen.

It was planned to fully implement this system of control over the market of medicines by 2019, but now the development of this concept is decided to accelerate and by 2018 they promise the possibility of controlling all the packs of drugs sold in Russia. So we will see the real value of using this registry soon, if there is no delay in the implementation.