How many counterfeit medicines and seemingly medicinal products reach the Hungarian population? One of the projects of the workgroup of the Department of Pharmaceutics is trying to develop a method for this question: what is the number of false and illegal drugs coming to Hungary today.
Information, disinformation, illegal services and products, whose proliferating electronic black markets serve hundreds of thousands of consumers globally, often slip through the online, watchful eye of search engines and the vigilant gatekeepers of the digital realm and law enforcement agencies online. Just as the market for illegal drugs is overwhelmingly active on the deep, but especially on the invisible web called the dark web, it provides a hotbed for the sale of counterfeit and illegal drugs.
The illegal distribution of counterfeit and illegal medicines, as well as products that appear to be medicines to lay people (non-medicinal products, as well as food supplements, medical devices, etc.) or health care products, also affects Hungary.
Why fake?
It is fake because it does not contain the active ingredients that the original preparation should contain according to the regulations. However, this illegal activity has non-negligible economic and legal consequences, which the National Tax and Customs Administration is trying to remedy modestly by filtering out these products and preparations from abroad and fighting illegal trade.
The project
A workgroup of the Department of Pharmaceutics aimed to develop a methodology that can be used to obtain more accurate data on the number of counterfeit products ordered from illegal online sources that reach the Hungarian population and endanger their safety. Two members of the workgroup, Prof. Dr. Lajos Botz and Dr. Péter Vajda, started the planning and implementation of a pilot study in collaboration with the National Tax Customs Administration. The aim was to outline a more realistic picture and a more accurate data set on the number of illegal and counterfeit products ordered online from abroad to Hungary.
Taking into consideration the guidelines of the WHO and workgroup against counterfeit medicines of the National Board Against Counterfeiting, Prof. Dr. Lajos Botz and Dr. Peter Vajda has developed a checklist to go through to check whether a letter containing a medicine or a product that looks like a medicine contains a counterfeit / illegal product or not.
Test results: Effective filter
The resulting data are relevant and would be publishable, as they are based on a review of all letters from a given destination country to be delivered to customers via the Magyar Posta (Hungarian Post). The trade of counterfeit and illegal medicines is not only an economically and legally important problem, it is still opaque and to be solved, but it is a much more important and dangerous consequence that it can damage the health and recovery of patients. The checklist compiled by the workgroup and the developed methodology can be the basis for the quantification of counterfeit / illegal medicines arriving in Hungary by post, thus we can get a picture of how many users these types of products can reach.