Lebanon takes fight to medicine counterfeiters

The Ministry of Health in Lebanon is spearheading a new labelling initiative to help consumers check the authenticity of their medicines quickly and easily.

Under the new project, certain medicines in the country will carry a label bearing the slogan 'Living Proof' and incorporating a scratch panel. When a patient scratches the panel an alphanumeric code is revealed which can be checked for authenticity by ringing a telephone helpline.

The move is part of a series of measures undertaken by the government and the pharmaceutical industry to try to counter a growing problem of medicine counterfeiting in the country.

The Lebanese authorities have been cracking down on the sale of fake drugs in recent months - closing down more than a dozen pharmacies and warehouses this year for selling counterfeit versions of drugs, including the life-saving heart medicine clopidogrel.

The health ministry has been running a public information programme to warn of the dangers of buying fake pharmaceuticals since 2008.

The Lebanese Parliamentary Health Committee, which in 2004 issued a report suggesting that up to a third of medicines circulating in the country were fake, is also considering the implementation of new laws to allow tougher penalties to be levied on individuals found guilty of involvement in the counterfeit trade.

Currently the law treats medicines counterfeiting under general intellectual property and copyrighting law, with fines set at a maximum of $30,000 and those found guilty looking at jail sentences of under three years at most, unless evidence of harm can be provided.

Meanwhile, other stakeholders are also taking action. The Order of the Pharmacists of Lebanon (OPL) has suggested that pharmacists should be positioned within customs and hospitals to help guard against the entry of falsified and substandard medicines into the legitimate supply chain.

There have also been calls to set up a national laboratory that could be used to test suspect products quickly and support enforcement actions.

The Lebanese pharmaceutical market is estimated at around $500m a year, and could be significantly higher if counterfeits could be driven out of the marketplace, according to data from Business Monitor International. It is also a fairly fast-growing market and could almost double in size to around $900m by 2019, says BMI.

BMI notes that the implementation of packaging technologies such as holograms and the scratch panel system described, while more costly to implement, "will remove any doubt at the point of customs which would otherwise lead to confiscation by regulatory officials."

"The government in Lebanon must be seen to be actively tackling the counterfeit drug problem, particularly since its neighbours (including the UAE, Egypt and Jordan) have been making significant progress in this area in the last two years," continues BMI.