VIENNA (Reuters) - Harry Lime, peddling diluted penicillin in post-war Vienna in the 1949 film "The Third Man", was an early pioneer: today the counterfeit medicine business has gone global, fuelled by the "perfect channel" of the Internet, according to a U.N drug watchdog.
In many countries, the abuse and trafficking of prescription drugs, including stimulants and painkillers, now equals or exceeds the use of illicitly manufactured heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and opioids, according to the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).
In the United States, it is second only to cannabis.
The massive demand for these drugs -- together with lifestyle medicines such as Pfizer's Viagra -- has led to an explosion in counterfeits, sometimes with fatal results.
"The sophistication of the counterfeiters certainly has increased tremendously," Gisela Wieser-Herbeck, a drug control officer at the INCB, told Reuters.
"It's a market where you can make a lot of money."
The human cost can be devastating. Victims include women in Argentina who died after taking a bogus anaemia treatment, deaths in Cambodia due to fake malaria drugs, and children in Haiti and India killed by paracetamol made with antifreeze.
In many African countries and parts of Asia and Latin America more than 30 percent of medicines on sale may be counterfeit, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Most industrialised countries have a fake drug rate of less than 1 percent, although a recent spate of fake cholesterol, schizophrenia and cancer drugs in Europe has raised concerns that criminals are spreading their net.
NO CONTROLS
The INCB, which will address the problem at its next session in November, has called on governments to do more to enforce existing legislation. But tackling the criminal trade is difficult.
"The Internet provides a perfect channel because there is no national control mechanism, there is no quality assurance and there is nobody who is going to ask where you got the supply," Wieser-Herbeck said.
