Dangerous Doses

If you have chosen to read this blog but you still haven’t read Dangerous Doses by Katherine Eban, you have made the wrong choice. The book is a great read. It documents the events in the early 2000’s that led the State of Florida to pass the first state pedigree law in 2003. You can draw a straight line between those events and all of the state pedigree laws that came after it. The book is a detailed accounting of crimes that occurred after a few criminals realized that law enforcement and the courts would not take seriously any drug crime that did not involve illegal drugs. But a small group of detectives and a lone prosecutor took them on and eventually brought them to justice. The book alternates between narratives of the crimes, the pursuit of the criminals by the detectives, and Eban’s explanation of how the pharmaceutical supply chain worked back at that time.

But that’s just it. The book was written at a time when things were different than they are now in some very important ways. As I understand it, back then, you could have spent less money on a license to distribute pharmaceuticals than you would if you obtained a license to open a bar. As a consequence, there were thousands of drug wholesalers licensed in Florida. But in 2003 the state toughened its licensing laws, greatly increased the cost of the licenses and increased the penalties for crimes related to wholesale distribution of pharmaceuticals. The HDMA cataloged the significant changes to Florida’s drug distribution regulations as the result of those changes. The number of licensed wholesalers plummeted to only a few hundred in the following years.

Oh, and they passed a pedigree requirement too.

I have to admit that I don’t have a good window into what exactly is going on in the Florida crime scene today but given the heightened awareness in the press of counterfeiting and diversion stories, I have to think that there is not nearly the problem that there was back in 2002, or we would hear about it.

So that pedigree requirement really worked, right? Maybe, but I have to think that the increased licensing fees and other requirements, the increased penalties and the increased interest by the courts are the things that really caused criminals to think twice about getting into that business.

Dangerous Doses is a great book and I still highly recommend it to anyone, especially those like me, who are responsible for working on pedigree, serialization and track & trace systems for companies in the supply chain. But as you read it try to keep in mind, that era doesn’t exist anymore. Since that time many other states have taken comparable steps to strengthen their licensing and toughen penalties. And many of them have also passed some type of pedigree law. Stay tuned for more about some of those laws in later posts.

Do drugs still get counterfeited and sold in the U.S.? Probably, but the criminal activity seems to have moved from the supply chain to the internet where criminals can hide just across the borders. Check your spam folder for the evidence.