Red Pill: Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy fined $500,000,000

[Beach]

Thought to post this article about some of the questionable activities that have gone on at the drug maker Ranbaxy.

They manufacture several pharmaceuticals, in particular Pantoprazole used to treat GERD.

"Red Pill: Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy fined $500,000,000"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/red-pill-indian-generic-drug-maker.html

except from Steve Sailor's article:

I know that nobody is interested in stories about pharmaceutical corruption, but this Fortune article "Dirty Medicine" by Katherine Eban about the Indian generic drug manufacturer Ranbaxy is an absolute must read.

Ranbaxy got the U.S. legal monopoly on making the generic version of Lipitor, the world's biggest drug. It also made a host of others, such as amoxicillin, the traditional antibiotic given to babies with earaches.

The article is slow to get going, but it just builds and builds.

By the way, I had been hearing the name "Ranbaxy" for a number of years, but I had absolutely no clue how corrupt it was. Consider Ranbaxy Laboratories Wikipedia page as of May 25, 2013, which is mostly cheerleading and doesn't yet mention Eban's 10-day-old article.

As you read it, consider Ranbaxy from the perspective of conspiracy theories. It would be not unreasonable to consider Ranbaxy a giant conspiracy to defraud the world's patients. And yet ... very few people, including company insiders, competitors, regulators, investors, patients, and journalists, seem to have noticed before Eban's article pulled it all together to show us how deep the rabbit hole goes.

People like to imagine conspiracies as well-oiled organizational machines, but this one was comprised merely of incompetence, carelessness, greed, bad temper, and a whole lot of people assuming that things can't be as bad as they look....

 

[mf15]

Just a litte story I have.
Two years ago I have to take Flomax for none bacterial prostatitis,well anyhow tried 3 generics,they all did not work that well with many side effects. I switched over to Brand name Flomax,guess what much less side effects. Of course had to pay for the brand name out of my own pocket. All these generics are put through what is called bio equivalence testing,and are supposed to be close or the same as brand name.

My daughter works for big pharma as a scientist,anyhow I told here this story of mine,
she said don't be surprised if the generics slip in brand name drugs in their samples to the
FDA for bioequivalence testing.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/753040_3
Old Mike

 

[Beach]

What surprised me about the article was how long the practice seems to have gone on. I worked in the food industry around a decade ago. We sold some health supplements, along with working with a few pharmaceutical firms. From what I recall, by law we needed to test our ingredients purchased to make sure they met assay result - that the active ingredients were there. The FDA could come in and inspect our records, making sure we were keeping QC up.

Everyone knew and talked about the poor quality goods coming from China and India. An extra close eye was needed on products bought from those countries. Overall though it was best to not trust anyone, and test all products.

It seems the retailers buying from Ranbaxy have not been doing this, testing purchased items before passing them onto the public. I guess the system is different for how pharmaceuticals are handled. Maybe I'm missing something from the article.

Possibly if there are potency and quality issues with other generics, outside testing groups such as Consumer Reports of Consumer Labs would find more poor Q/C measures. Keeping a positive reputations is typically important for retailers.