Curbing Counterfeit Prescription Painkillers

As prescription painkillers have become big business, counterfeit meds began cropping up by those hoping to cash in. These fakes can be dangerous, though, especially since there’s no way to know just what’s in them.

Now, a new tech startup has found a way to help head off issues caused by counterfeit drugs trying to pass themselves off as the originals. A company called Sproxil is tagging pharmaceutical products in Africa with a scratch-off code similar to those found on gift cards or prepaid cell phone cards. The customer uses their phone to text the code to Sproxil’s product authentication service, which verifies if the product is genuine.

It’s a lot of trouble to go to, but it just might be the wave of the future. Sproxil already received $1.8 million in funding, and has plans to use the cash to expand into India and Kenya as well as build sales teams in the U.S. and Nigeria.

Sproxil isn’t the first company to address this issue. Drug makers have also been trying to curb the worldwide counterfeit drug market, which has cost them an estimated $200 billion so far. They’ve turned to barcodes and holograms on packaging, chemical tests and laser scanning, but most of these techniques are expensive or require costly technology.

As much as 30 percent of the drugs sold in developing nations are counterfeit, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Add that to the high percentage of medicines in these countries that are substandard, so they don’t contain doses high enough to be effective, and it’s a crisis in the making.

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