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88–828 2015

COUNTERFEIT DRUGS: FIGHTING ILLEGAL SUPPLY 

CHAINS 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND 

INVESTIGATIONS 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND 

COMMERCE 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

FEBRUARY 27, 2014 

Serial No. 113–120 

( 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce 

energycommerce.house.gov 

(II) 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE 

FRED UPTON, Michigan 

Chairman 

RALPH M. HALL, Texas 

JOE BARTON, Texas 

Chairman Emeritus 

ED WHITFIELD, Kentucky 

JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois 

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania 

GREG WALDEN, Oregon 

LEE TERRY, Nebraska 

MIKE ROGERS, Michigan 

TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

Vice Chairman 

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia 

STEVE SCALISE, Louisiana 

ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio 

CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS, Washington 

GREGG HARPER, Mississippi 

LEONARD LANCE, New Jersey 

BILL CASSIDY, Louisiana 

BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky 

PETE OLSON, Texas 

DAVID B. MCKINLEY, West Virginia 

CORY GARDNER, Colorado 

MIKE POMPEO, Kansas 

ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois 

H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia 

GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida 

BILL JOHNSON, Missouri 

BILLY LONG, Missouri 

RENEE L. ELLMERS, North Carolina 

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California 

Ranking Member 

JOHN D. DINGELL, Michigan 

Chairman Emeritus 

FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey 

BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois 

ANNA G. ESHOO, California 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

GENE GREEN, Texas 

DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado 

LOIS CAPPS, California 

MICHAEL F. DOYLE, Pennsylvania 

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

JIM MATHESON, Utah 

G.K. BUTTERFIELD, North Carolina 

JOHN BARROW, Georgia 

DORIS O. MATSUI, California 

DONNA M. CHRISTENSEN, Virgin Islands 

KATHY CASTOR, Florida 

JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa 

PETER WELCH, Vermont 

BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS

TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania 

Chairman 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

Vice Chairman 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia 

STEVE SCALISE, Louisiana 

GREGG HARPER, Mississippi 

PETE OLSON, Texas 

CORY GARDNER, Colorado 

H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia 

BILL JOHNSON, Ohio 

BILLY LONG, Missouri 

RENEE L. ELLMERS, North Carolina 

JOE BARTON, Texas 

FRED UPTON, Michigan (ex officio) 

DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado 

Ranking Member 

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa 

BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico 

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

G.K. BUTTERFIELD, North Carolina 

KATHY CASTOR, Florida 

PETER WELCH, Vermont 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky 

GENE GREEN, Texas 

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California (ex officio) 

(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hon. Tim Murphy, a Representative in Congress from the Commonwealth 

of Pennsylvania, opening statement ................................................................... 1 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 3 

Hon. Diana DeGette, a Representative in Congress from the state of Colorado, 

opening statement ................................................................................................ 4 

Prepared statement ..........................................................................................

Hon. Michael C. Burgess, a Representative in Congress from the State of 

Texas, opening statement .................................................................................... 6 

Hon. Henry A. Waxman, a Representative in Congress from the State of 

California, opening statement ............................................................................. 7 

WITNESSES

Howard Sklamberg, J.D., Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ................................. 9 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 13 

Answers to submitted questions ...................................................................... 162 

Lev Kubiak, Director, National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination 

Center, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) .................................................................................................... 30 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 32 

Marcia Crosse, Ph.D., Director of Health Care, U.S. Government Accountability Office ......................................................................................................... 65 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 67 

Prashant Yadav, Ph.D., M.B.A., Director of Health Care Research Initiative, 

Director of the William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan ............... 84 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 87 

Answers to submitted questions 1 ................................................................... 178 

John P. Clark, Vice President and Chief Security Officer, Global Security, 

Compliance Division, Pfizer, Inc. ........................................................................ 97 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 100 

Answers to submitted questions ...................................................................... 182 

Jean-Luc Moreau, Global Head of Product Security, Novartis Corporation ....... 108 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 110 

Bruce Longbottom, Ph.D., Assistant General Counsel, Eli Lilly and Company . 123 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 125 

Elizabeth Jungman, J.D., M.P.H., Director of Drug Safety And Innovation, 

Pew Charitable Trusts ......................................................................................... 137 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 139 

SUBMITTED MATERIAL

Subcommittee memorandum .................................................................................. 156 

Report entitled,‘‘Countering the Problem of Falsified and Substandard Drugs,’’ 

The Institute of Medicine 2

Executive summary of report entitled,‘‘Countering the Problem of Falsified 

and Substandard Drugs,’’ The Institute of Medicine ........................................ 186 

1Report entitled,‘‘Ensuring Safe Foods and Medical Products Through Stronger Regulatory Systems Abroad,’’ The Institute of Medicine 3

Executive summary of report entitled,‘‘Ensuring Safe Foods and Medical 

Products Through Stronger Regulatory Systems Abroad,’’ The Institute of 

Medicine ................................................................................................................ 200 

Article entitled,‘‘What to do about unsafe medicines,’’ The BMJ ........................ 212 

Report entitled, ‘‘Internet Drug Outlet Identification Program,’’ National Association of Boards of Pharmacy ......................................................................... 214 

Page

IV 

Key Data About Online Sales of Prescription Medicines, Alliance for Safe 

Online Pharmacies ............................................................................................... 229 

1 The attachment to Mr. Yadav’s response is available at: http:// 

docs.house.gov/meetings/if/if17/20140228/101812/hhrg-113-if17-wstatemanneg-20140228-sd002.pdf. 2 The information is available at: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF02/ 

20140227/101804/HHRG-113-IF02-20140227-SD005.pdf. 3 The information is available at: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF02/ 

20140227/101804/HHRG-113-IF02-20140227-SD007.pdf. 

(1) 

COUNTERFEIT DRUGS: FIGHTING ILLEGAL 

SUPPLY CHAINS 

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS, 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE, 

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:02 a.m., in room 

2322 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tim Murphy 

(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Members present: Representatives Murphy, Burgess, Blackburn, 

Griffith, Johnson, Long, Ellmers, DeGette, Braley, Tonko, Dingell, 

and Waxman (ex officio). 

Staff present: Karen Christian, Chief Counsel, Oversight; Noelle 

Clemente, Press Secretary; Brad Grantz, Policy Coordinator, Oversight and Investigations; Brittany Havens, Legislative Clerk; Sean 

Hayes, Counsel, Oversight and Investigations; Alan Slobodin, Deputy Chief Counsel, Oversight; Tom Wilbur, Digital Media Advisor; 

Jessica Wilkerson, Legislative Clerk; Brian Cohen, Democratic 

Staff Director, Oversight and Investigations, and Senior Policy Advisor; Eric Flamm, Democratic FDA Detailee; Kiren Gopal, Democratic Counsel; Hannah Green, Democratic Staff Assistant; and 

Stephen Salsbury, Democratic Investigator. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. TIM MURPHY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 

Mr. MURPHY. Good morning, and welcome to the Oversight and 

Investigations Subcommittee hearing of Energy and Commerce titled ‘‘Counterfeit Drugs: Fighting Illegal Supply Chains.’’ 

This hearing could also be titled ‘‘Poison Pills in Your Medicine 

Cabinet, or Counterfeiters Deliver Deadly Drugs,’’ and it is due to 

the fact that we need to examine the growing problem of counterfeit drugs in our country. 

Last year Congress took an important first step against this 

threat by enacting the new track-and-trace law known as the Drug 

Quality and Security Act of 2013. This new law will secure the legitimate distribution channels, and when implemented will solve 

the legal supply chain part of the counterfeit drug problem. 

However, many Americans purchase medicines through illegal 

supply chains, such as rogue Internet pharmacies and other black 

markets. It is that part of the counterfeit drug threat that we address today. This hearing focuses on the illegal supply chains of 

2 

counterfeit drugs, and on efforts to deter and disrupt these illegal 

supply chains. 

The legitimate U.S. drug supply is safe. But counterfeit drugs 

from illegal sources are a significant and growing global public 

health threat, potentially causing treatment failure or death and 

contributing to increased antimicrobial resistance. The policy of the 

U.S. government is not to wait for a full-blown crisis before taking 

appropriate action. 

Drug counterfeiters do not just steal intellectual property. They 

recklessly and intentionally endanger human lives. They sell counterfeits that do not contain active ingredients and provide no treatment benefit to the patient. Thus, a child suffering from malaria 

who takes a fake anti-malaria drug might die within 48 hours because the malaria remains untreated. The counterfeiters sell fakes 

that may contain incorrect ingredients, improper dosages, hazardous or poisonous ingredients. For example, an emergency room 

doctor from Texas in 2011 took a counterfeit weight loss drug he 

bought from an online pharmacy. The drug was contaminated with 

a controlled substance and he suffered a stroke. 

The counterfeiters sell drugs with risks for harmful side effects 

or allergic reactions. For example, in 2007 and 2008, dozens of 

heart surgery and kidney dialysis patients in the United States 

suffered unexpected allergic-like reactions and several lost their 

lives due to intentionally contaminated heparin imported from 

China that had entered the Chinese heparin supply purporting to 

be pure heparin. 

The counterfeiters do not care about the patients who are hurt. 

One counterfeiter, Richard Taylor, was notified in May 2011 that 

two patients who had been on a counterfeit cancer drug he had distributed had started to shake in the middle of being transfused and 

had to be disconnected from treatment. 

However, the penalties for drug counterfeiters under the Federal 

Food Drug and Cosmetic Act have not been updated since 1938. As 

the FDA Commissioner has said, there is a steeper penalty for 

counterfeiting a designer purse under the Federal Criminal Code 

than a drug product under current FDA law. 

Drug counterfeiting is highly profitable, and the criminals only 

face the maximum penalties under the FDA law of $10,000 or 3 

years in prison. In contrast, penalties for trafficking narcotics can 

have prison sentences up to life and fines in the millions of dollars. 

There is one estimate that the return on counterfeit drugs may be 

10 times greater than that of the sale of illegal narcotics. 

Now, experts tell us the counterfeit drug problem has worsened 

over the last decade, and the reasons for this disturbing trend include increasing opportunities created by larger, more complex supply chains; more customers reachable through the Internet; more 

cases where the counterfeiting crimes occur in several countries 

making enforcement more difficult; and the expansion of counterfeiting from so-called lifestyle drugs into therapeutic medicines 

used to treat cancer, heart disease or other illnesses. 

The illegal supply chains are numerous and global. Rogue Internet pharmacies are now proliferating. There are believed to be 

about 35,000 to 50,000 active online sellers, 97 percent of which do 

not comply with U.S. laws, according to one review of over 10,000 

3 

Internet sites. One report estimated that one in six Americans—36 

million people—have bought medicines online without a valid prescription. These illegal pharmacy operations are big business, with 

the largest ones reportedly making $1 to 2.5 million of sales each 

month. 

The sheer volume of imported drugs into the United States is 

overwhelming and opportunities have never been greater for foreign, unapproved drugs to get into the United States. Nearly 40 

percent of drugs taken by Americans are made overseas, and 80 

percent of the active ingredients are imported from about 3,800 foreign manufacturers, in more than 150 countries. According to a 

2011 FDA report, the number of foreign drug suppliers has doubled 

in the last 7 years. The Government Accountability Office has 

found FDA is only able to inspect foreign drug plants every 9 years 

while FDA inspects domestic drug manufacturers every 2 years. 

The subcommittee will also examine other illegal supply chains 

such as medical clinics and doctors who purchase drugs from illegal 

sources, business-to-business networks, and smugglers bringing unapproved or counterfeit drugs from Mexico into the United States. 

I welcome all of today’s outstanding witnesses and I look forward 

to your testimony. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Murphy follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. TIM MURPHY

The subcommittee meets to examine the growing problem of counterfeit drugs. 

Another fitting title for our hearing today: ‘‘Poison Pills in Your Medicine Cabinet: 

Counterfeiters Deliver Deadly Drugs.’’ 

Last year Congress took an important first step against this threat by enacting 

the new track-and-trace law known as the Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013. 

This new law will secure the legitimate distribution channels, and when implemented will solve the legal supply chain part of the counterfeit drug problem. 

However, many Americans purchase medicines through illegal supply chains, such 

as rogue Internet pharmacies and other black markets. It is that part of the counterfeit drug threat we address today. This hearing focuses on the illegal supply 

chains of counterfeit drugs, and on efforts to deter and disrupt these illegal supply 

chains. 

The legitimate U.S. drug supply is safe. But counterfeit drugs from illegal sources 

are a significant and growing global public-health threat, potentially causing treatment failure or death and contributing to increased anti-microbial resistance. The 

policy of the U.S. government is not to wait for a full-blown crisis before taking appropriate action. 

Drug counterfeiters do not just steal intellectual property. They recklessly and intentionally endanger human lives. 

They sell counterfeits that do not contain active ingredients and provide no treatment benefit to the patient. Thus, a child suffering from malaria who takes a fake 

anti-malaria drug might die within 48 hours because the malaria remains untreated. 

The counterfeiters sell fakes that may contain incorrect ingredients, improper dosages, hazardous, or poisonous ingredients. For example, an emergency room doctor 

from Texas in 2011 took a counterfeit weight loss drug he bought from an online 

pharmacy. The drug was contaminated with a controlled substance and he suffered 

a stroke. 

The counterfeiters sell drugs with risks for harmful side effects or allergic reactions. For example, in 2007 and 2008, dozens of heart-surgery and kidney-dialysis 

patients in the U.S. suffered unexpected allergictype reactions and several lost their 

lives due to intentionally contaminated heparin imported from China that had entered the Chinese heparin supply purporting to be pure heparin. 

The counterfeiters do not care about the patients who are hurt. One counterfeiter, 

Richard Taylor, was notified in May 2011 that two patients who had been on a 

counterfeit cancer drug he had distributed had started to shake in the middle of 

being transfused and had to be disconnected from treatment. 

4 

However, the penalties for drug-counterfeiting under the Federal Food Drug and 

Cosmetic Act have not been updated since 1938. As the FDA Commissioner has 

said, there is a steeper penalty for counterfeiting a designer purse under the Federal Criminal Code than a drug product under current FDA law. 

Drug counterfeiting is highly profitable, and the criminals only face the maximum penalties under the FDA law of $10,000 or three years in prison. In contrast, penalties for trafficking narcotics can have prison sentences up to life and fines in the 

millions of dollars. There is one estimate that the return on counterfeit drugs may 

be 10 times greater than that of the sale of illegal narcotics. 

Experts tell us the counterfeit drug problem has worsened over the last decade. 

The reasons for this disturbing trend include: increasing opportunities created by 

larger, more complex supply chains; more customers reachable through the Internet; 

more cases where the counterfeiting crimes occur in several countries making enforcement more difficult; and the expansion of counterfeiting from so-called lifestyle 

drugs into therapeutic medicines used to treat cancer, heart disease, or other illnesses. The illegal supply chains are numerous and global. Rogue Internet pharmacies 

are proliferating. There are believed to be about 35,000–50,000 active online sellers, 

97 percent of which do not comply with U.S. laws, according to one review of over 

10,000 Internet sites. One report estimated that one in six Americans—36 million 

people—have bought medicines online without a valid prescription. These illegal 

pharmacy operations are big business, with the largest ones reportedly making $1 

to 2.5 million dollars of sales a month. 

The sheer volume of imported drugs into the U.S. is overwhelming and opportunities have never been greater for foreign unapproved drugs to get into the U.S. Nearly 40 percent of drugs taken by Americans are made overseas and 80 percent of the 

active ingredients are imported from about 3,800 foreign manufacturers, in more 

than 150 countries. According to a 2011 FDA report, the number of foreign drug 

suppliers has doubled in the last seven years. The Government Accountability Office 

(GAO) has found FDA is only able to inspect foreign drug plants every nine years 

while FDA inspects domestic drug manufacturers about every 2 years. 

The subcommittee will also examine other illegal supply chains such as medical 

clinics and doctors who purchase drugs from illegal sources, business-to-business 

(B2B) networks, and smugglers bringing unapproved or counterfeit drugs from Mexico into the U.S. 

I welcome all of today’s outstanding witnesses and look forward to their testimony. 

Mr. MURPHY. And now I turn to recognize my friend, and the 

Ranking Member, Ms. DeGette of Colorado. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DIANA DEGETTE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate you having this hearing. 

We had a number of hearings some years ago in this committee 

on drug counterfeiting, and it was shocking and appalling to see 

how serious this problem is. While we did pass that great bill last 

year, still I think that drug counterfeiting is a terrible problem that 

we need to address in a bipartisan fashion. 

As you said, counterfeit drugs can contain dangerous impurities, 

incorrect ingredients, improper dosages, and also have improper 

handling, and legitimate drugs have been diverted or stolen from 

the supply chain and they have been handled improperly or stored 

at the wrong temperature, and then of course, these fraudsters 

spend a lot of time recreating labels and packaging for the dangerous drug so that they look exactly like the real thing. 

I got some samples today. These are Lipitor samples, and they 

look exactly the same. The blister packs are the same, the pills are 

exactly the same, the alleged dosages are exactly the same, and if 

you ordered these online, you would think that you were getting 

5 

Lipitor. However, which one is the real and which one is the fake? 

You couldn’t possibly tell except where there is a label on the package. Here is the fake and here is the real. And this is what these 

counterfeiters do. They spend more time worrying about what the 

packaging is going to like look so it will fool the consumer and a 

lot less time worrying about whether there’s actual medication inside that’s going to help people. 

We have seen a number of troubling cases recently. Criminals 

have tampered with pharmaceuticals used to treat illnesses like 

cancer and HIV/AIDS. Drugs used to treat schizophrenia were replaced with aspirin. Counterfeit cancer drugs were tainted with 

non-sterile tap water, and counterfeit AIDS drugs have been found 

to lack any ingredient, and as you said, the Internet is really especially problematic for these unsafe drugs, and according to a recent 

FDA survey, approximately one in four Americans has purchased 

prescription drugs online. Most consumers purchase drugs from 

reputable businesses but there are thousands of rogue Internet 

pharmacies, some of which you couldn’t tell from just looking onsite 

that sell drugs of dubious quality without a prescription. I couldn’t 

believe it that you said that there was a doctor who bought these 

drugs online. I mean, surely if anybody should know, it should be 

a doctor. 

Now, Congress passed the Ryan Haight Act in 2008 and then 

last year, as you said, the Drug Quality and Security Act, which 

provide additional enforcement tools, and so I am eager to hear 

from the GAO whether these laws have had an impact in combating this problem and what more can be done. I am also interested to learn from the stakeholders and agencies how we can increase awareness and education in the medical community and the 

public more broadly about the prevalence of and risks associated 

with counterfeit drugs. 

I must say, I talk to my constituents, and people assume if they 

are buying drugs from a pharmacy online that it would be safe, and 

that is an incorrect assumption to make. I think we need to have 

partnerships between the pharmaceutical companies, between government agencies, between nonprofit agencies and a variety of 

sources to let people know how dangerous it can be to buy drugs 

from an Internet source. 

And I want to commend the FDA, ICE, and the other federal 

agencies for their work in protecting consumers from unsafe drugs, 

but I also want to learn more about what we can do about counterfeiting drug activity and whether we need more authorities or 

stricter penalties to effectively carry out this work. 

Globally, the FDA works with World Health Organization and 

Interpol to build global capacity to monitor counterfeit drugs and 

to coordinate international law enforcement action, and so I know 

that our witness from the University of Michigan, Dr. Yadav, will 

talk about the global health implications of counterfeit drug activity and how existing international efforts can be strengthened. 

Prosecuting these wrongdoers is difficult because they are shady 

and they are international, but I think if we have domestic and 

international partnerships, we can do it. 

Consumers should never have to fear the prescription drug they 

need may actually make them sick or endanger the lives of their 

6 

loved ones, and so that is why these partnerships are critical. I 

look forward to hearing from our witnesses and continuing to work 

together to make sure that when a consumer buys a drug, they 

know that it is going to be safe. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentlelady yields back and I now recognize the 

vice chairman of the subcommittee, Dr. Burgess, for 5 minutes. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MICHAEL C. BURGESS, A 

REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS 

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the chairman for the recognition. I thank 

our witnesses for being here, a terribly important hearing that we 

are having this morning. 

Let me begin my statement with a quote: ‘‘The market for prescription drugs has been the catalyst for a continuing series of 

frauds against American manufacturers and has provided cover for 

counterfeit drugs. The effect of these practices and conditions is to 

create an unacceptable risk that counterfeit, adulterated, misbranded, subpotent or expired drugs will be sold to American consumers.’’ 

Now, you might think I am reading from today’s hearing memo 

but in fact they were from the findings of the Prescription Drug 

Marketing Act of 1987. That bipartisan law was the result of a series of hearings conducted with Chairman Dingell in this very subcommittee. In the report accompanying the bill from 1987, this subcommittee found, again quoting, ‘‘American consumers cannot purchase prescription drugs with the certainty that the products are 

safe and effective. This is not to say that the shelves of the Nation’s pharmacies are lined with substandard products or that 

there are inadequate controls in the manufacturing process. Rather, the integrity of the distribution system is insufficient to prevent 

the introduction and the eventual retail sale of substandard, ineffective or even counterfeit pharmaceuticals,’’ again, quoting from 

the findings in 1987. 

The United States has the best drug supply chain in the world, 

and this committee’s work has been long and notable and medications have become more advanced. Our supply chain has become 

more global in its reach. The equally consistent and sophisticated 

attacks each and every day by counterfeiters, rogue distributors 

and those willing to adulterate products and put patients at risk 

are no less today than they were in 1987. 

According to the World Health Organization, in 2010 worldwide 

counterfeit medicine sales topped $75 billion. That was almost doubling in 5 years, and some speculate the number will continue to 

grow by 20 percent each year. 

At its most extreme, these criminals are willing to literally risk 

patients’ lives to sell counterfeits. As a doctor, such immorality of 

knowingly sentencing a patient to death by either denying them 

treatment or selling them an adulterated product, that is an absolutely chilling proposition. In my opinion, punishment for counterfeiting prescription medications is so far from adequate as to be 

laughable. 

From fake flu vaccines to oncology drugs, counterfeit medications 

have been able to enter the supply chain and in fact administered 

7 

to patients. Detecting counterfeit drugs is difficult, if not impossible. There is no field test that we can send people out to perform 

to indicate whether a drug is fake or real, and even the trained experts are often unable to detect whether a drug is what it purports 

to be. Counterfeit and other adulterated drugs present an unreasonable risk to Americans. 

Thankfully, this committee, this subcommittee has remained 

vigilant, and I believe the passage of the Drug Quality and Security Act last year will provide a valuable tool. Some will argue it 

took too long but nevertheless, it does tighten our distribution system. While our system may be the best in the world, our health 

care workforce does not have the confidence that they should have 

that the drugs they are dispensing or administering are the ones 

that came from the manufacturer. 

I will also note that a December 2005 report found that nearly 

half of the imported drugs the Food and Drug Administration intercepted from four selected countries to fill orders placed with firms 

that consumers thought were Canadian, in fact, 85 percent came 

from 27 other countries around the globe. A number of these products were also found to be counterfeit. 

Just as a practical matter, I will never forget the day in my practice back in north Texas when the story broke that fake oral contraceptives had been introduced into the market. Our phones melted down that morning, and many anxious patients spent many 

anxious hours trying to determine if they had the pill or the lot 

number from the inappropriate counterfeit pills and whether or not 

they would have the potency to provide the protection they were 

purported to provide. 

Maintaining the integrity of the United States prescription drug 

supply is a compelling national priority and requires national solutions involving business, health care providers and governments 

coming together and being vigilant in the face of threats. The vigilance of this committee, this subcommittee, has been established in 

the past and continues today. 

I thank the chairman for the recognition. I will yield back the 

balance of my time. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentleman yields back. I now recognize the 

ranking member of the full committee, Mr. Waxman, for 5 minutes. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. HENRY A. WAXMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA 

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am 

pleased that we are having an important oversight hearing where 

20 minutes so far into the opening statements, no one has blamed 

the problem on President Obama. This is rare for this committee. 

But we are doing the job that we should be doing because the 

entry of counterfeit drugs into our drug supply chain poses a great 

public health threat. Time and again, we have read stories about 

patients getting drugs from Internet pharmacies or even their doctors or local pharmacies that were unsafe or ineffective counterfeits, or that were stolen, or not stored properly so they no longer 

worked. 

8 

We have taken legislative steps on a bipartisan basis to address 

this problem. In 2012, we passed the bipartisan Food and Drug Administration Drug Safety and Innovation Act. The law requires 

companies to notify FDA of drug thefts and counterfeit or adulterated drugs that could cause serious harm. It requires manufacturers and importers to register annually with the FDA and provide 

unique facility identifiers so that FDA knows who and where they 

are. It bans imports of drugs from foreign facilities that delay, deny 

or limit FDA inspection, and it enhances criminal penalties for intentionally counterfeiting or adulterating a drug in a way that 

could cause serious adverse health consequences. 

Last year, we passed the bipartisan Drug Quality and Security 

Act. This law gives the FDA and industry new tools to deter, discover and remedy the entry of illegal drugs into the supply chain. 

However, the legislation was not designed for sophisticated criminal enterprises intent on evading the law and the most useful of 

the new tools, an electronic unit-level tracking and tracing system 

is not required to be in place until 2023. So it is hard to reach a 

conclusion other than more needs to be done. 

Today the government has to prove an intent to violate the law 

before it can even win a criminal case, and even then, the maximum penalty for some violations with potentially life-threatening 

consequences is only 3 years. We need a stronger deterrent. 

We also need to consider what to do about the fact that so many 

of our drugs are sourced from abroad. This can create serious drug 

safety and security issues. In India, where FDA inspections have 

tripled since FDASIA, FDA is finding serious lapses in quality. And 

as the New York Times reported recently, even India’s top drug 

regulator concedes that most of the drug facilities supplying the domestic Indian market do not meet FDA standards. This is a serious 

problem because India is the second largest exporter of drugs to 

the U.S., supplying 40 percent of our generic and over-the-counter 

drugs. 

In China, the U.S. government had to negotiate for almost a full 

year just to get visas for the additional inspectors that FDA needs 

to conduct more frequent and timely inspections. It could put much 

of our drug supply at risk because the crucial ingredients for nearly 

all antibiotics, steroids and many other lifesaving drugs are now 

made exclusively in China. 

Well, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today, and I thank you for holding this important hearing. 

It is appropriate, it is legitimate, it is what oversight committees 

should be doing, and I hope it is the first step towards passing legislation that will effectively deter and punish those who put Americans’ health at risk with counterfeit pharmaceuticals. 

And I want to say in my closing minute, Mr. Chairman, unfortunately, there is another subcommittee meeting at the same time so 

I will be in and out of this hearing. I will review the testimony of 

the witnesses that will be making a presentation. Thank you. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. Mr. Waxman yields back. 

I would now like to introduce our witnesses on the first panel for 

today’s hearing. We do have two panels of distinguished people. 

First, Mr. Howard Sklamberg is the Deputy Commissioner for 

Global Regulatory Operations and Policy for the Food and Drug 

9 

Administration. I would like to note that due to the amount of exhibits the FDA would like to show in support of the testimony, both 

sides agree to allow Mr. Sklamberg 10 minutes for his oral testimony instead of the usual 5. 

And Mr. Lev Kubiak, welcome, the Director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center for the Department of 

Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

I will now swear in the witnesses. You are aware that the committee is holding an investigative hearing, and when doing so has 

the practice of taking testimony under oath. Do either of you object 

to testifying under oath? The Chair then advises you that under 

the rules of the House and the rules of the committee, you are entitled to be advised by counsel. Do either of you desire to be advised 

by counsel during the testimony today? In that case, would you 

please rise and raise your right hand, and I will swear you in. 

[Witnesses sworn.] 

Mr. MURPHY. You are now under oath and subject to the penalties set forth in Title XVIII, section 1001 of the United States 

Code. 

Mr. Sklamberg, you may now give your opening statement and 

video. 

TESTIMONY OF HOWARD SKLAMBERG, J.D., DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FOR GLOBAL REGULATORY OPERATIONS AND POLICY, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA); AND LEV 

KUBIAK, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 

RIGHTS COORDINATION CENTER, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) 

TESTIMONY OF HOWARD SKLAMBERG 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Ranking 

Member DeGette, and members of the subcommittee. I am Howard 

Sklamberg, Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy at the Food and Drug Administration, and thank 

you for this opportunity to be here today to discuss the important 

issue of counterfeit drugs. 

Counterfeit drugs raise significant public health concerns. A 

counterfeit drug could be made using ingredients that are toxic to 

patients and processed under poorly controlled and unsanitary conditions. In the United States, a relatively comprehensive system of 

laws, regulations and enforcement by federal and State authorities 

has kept drug counterfeiting incidents in the United States relatively rare. FDA continues to believe and works to ensure that 

Americans can have a high degree of confidence in the drugs they 

obtain through legal channels. Nonetheless, with the dramatic increase in the complexity of the global supply chain, we face enormous challenges regarding supply chain security. 

FDA is not alone in its effort to address the problem of counterfeit drugs, and I want to note the efforts of my colleagues on this 

panel and on the other panels in their work on this problem as 

well. 

Growth in counterfeiting may be spurred by several things including the increasing volume of drugs, longer supply chains, the 

10 

development of technologies that make it easier to counterfeit 

drugs, and the involvement of international organized crime. This 

growth also is exacerbated by the relatively low criminal penalties 

for distribution of adulterated, unapproved or misbranded drugs 

under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act compared to other 

types of crime. 

In addition, the Internet presents another layer of complexity by 

introducing more players and more opportunities for criminals to 

reach consumers. The global anonymity of the Internet can provide 

a safe haven for illicit prescription drug sales. Many Web sites 

leave unsuspecting customers in the United States to believe the 

dispensing pharmacy is in the United States or Canada. 

FDA has made it a priority to investigate reports of counterfeit 

products. As part of these efforts, FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations, or OCI, aggressively investigates reports of counterfeit 

products in order to protect U.S. citizens. OCI’s investigations have 

led to some notable successes. I would like to provide some examples from our investigations. 

The first is from an investigation into counterfeit Alli, and would 

the clerk please pull up the Alli video? 

[Video shown.] 

Thank you. And would the clerk please load picture one? 

[Slide shown.] 

And as it is being loaded, the picture shows a refrigerator used 

to store illegally imported, adulterated and misbranded prescription drugs that were smuggled into the United States. These drugs 

were discovered in the home of a repacker who had subsequently 

shipped the drugs to doctors throughout the United States. 

Would the clerk please load picture two? 

[Slide shown.] 

One of the ways some traffickers obtain prescription drugs is to 

buy them from customers at various pharmacies whose medications 

were paid for by Medicaid. In order to be able to reuse the bottle 

with the original label, they would have to clean the pharmacy 

label and the Medicaid sticker off of the label using things such as 

lighter fluid. Where we have observed bottle washing with a solvent, we generally observe chemicals in the solvent that have migrated through the bottle onto the drug. 

Would the clerk please load picture three? 

[Slide shown.] 

Well, through the particular bottle, I am not sure in the instances what type of bottle it is but we can get back to you on that, 

but it is common for things to migrate through plastic. 

Would the clerk please load picture three? 

[Slide shown.] 

The following photos were taken from a Belize-based manufacturing facility involved in selling unapproved prescription drugs 

and controlled substances. The pills from the trashcans in this picture were transferred into plastic bags to be counted and bagged 

by using a scoop. The same scoop was used for many different 

drugs including controlled drugs. This led to cross-contamination. 

Would the clerk please load picture four? 

[Slide shown.] 

11 

This picture shows some of the conditions at the manufacturing 

facility. 

Would the clerk please load picture five? 

[Slide shown.] 

This picture shows the condition of a tablet room at the facility. 

I want to show a comparison of what a legitimate tablet press 

should look like. Would the clerk please load picture six? 

[Slide shown.] 

So you can see the difference. 

FDA has been working with industry and international partners 

to develop new methods to address the problem of counterfeit 

drugs. FDA scientists have developed and have been testing a 

counterfeit detection device, CD–3, at U.S. ports of entry and elsewhere for use by FDA investigators to check for suspect counterfeit 

products. CD–3, which I am now holding, is a battery-operated, 

handheld and inexpensive tool that costs a fraction of the price of 

existing laboratory-based and field-deployed technologies. Would 

the clerk please play the CD–3 video? 

[Video shown.] 

It is important to note that while this technology is helpful it 

won’t solve the problem, particularly given the volume of products 

that come through ports of entry. 

FDA also participates in Operation Pangaea, which is a global 

cooperative effort in partnership with international regulatory and 

law enforcement agencies to combat the online sale and distribution of potentially dangerous counterfeit and illegal medical products. As part of the 2013 annual effort, the partnership took action 

against more than 13,700 Web sites illegally selling potentially 

dangerous unapproved prescription medicines to customers. These 

actions included the issuance of regulatory warnings and the seizure of offending Web sites and over $36 million worth of illegal 

medicines worldwide. FDA in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s 

Office for the District of Colorado seized and shut down 1,677 illegal pharmacy Web sites. 

The case of Manuel Calvelo illustrates the inherently international and thus difficult-to-prosecute nature of the Internet pharmacy investigations. Calvelo is a Belgian citizen operating a global 

Internet pharmacy with a call center in the Philippines and a credit processor in the Netherlands. Calvelo’s Web sites offered for sale 

more than 40 prescription drugs such as Viagra, Glucophage, 

Zoloft, Lipitor, Cialis, Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin. Note that 

Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin are controlled substances. OCI was 

able to arrest Calvelo in Costa Rico and extradite him to the 

United States after an extended undercover operation in which 

OCI agents posed as pharmaceutical wholesalers seeking to do 

business with them/him. 

Public education is very important as a first line of defense 

against counterfeit drugs. The agency is conducting proactive educational outreach to the medical community and other stakeholders. In September 2012, FDA launched a national campaign 

called Be Safe RX: Know Your Online Pharmacy. Be Safe RX provides resources for patients and caregivers who might purchase 

prescription drugs online to enable them to better understand who 

12 

they are buying from and to help ensure the drugs they buy match 

the product the doctor prescribed. 

The Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, or 

FDASIA, enacted in July 2012, provided the agency with new authorities that help to secure the safety and integrity of drugs imported into and sold in the United States. For example, the law 

provides the FDA with the authority to administratively detain 

drugs believed to be adulterated or misbranded and the authority 

to destroy certain adulterated, misbranded or counterfeit drugs offered for import. The law also requires foreign and domestic companies to provide complete information on threats to the security of 

the drug supply chain and to improve current registration and listing information. The recently enacted Drug Quality and Security 

Act outlines critical steps to build an electronic and operable system to identify and trace certain prescription drugs. Within 10 

years after enactment, the system will facilitate the exchange of information at the individual package level about where a drug has 

been in the supply chain. 

While the new authorities under FDASIA and the DQSA help address some of the risks posed by counterfeit drugs, they will not 

prevent all types of illegal diversion or distribution schemes. These 

laws would not prevent the numerous instances FDA has uncovered of medical practitioners deliberately obtaining unapproved 

drugs, some of which have been counterfeits directly from foreign 

sources for administering to patients. The reality is that the criminal penalty under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for the risky 

and inherently dangerous practice of importing unapproved foreign 

drugs is simply not sufficient to deter the criminal element. The 

penalty for such conduct, which generally falls under the misbranding and unapproved new drugs provisions of the FD&C Act 

is 3 years imprisonment and then only if the government can show 

there is a specific intent to defraud or mislead. Otherwise it is a 

misdemeanor punishable only by a maximum of one year of imprisonment. 

The Ryan Haight Act also sets forth for the first time under federal law the definition of a valid prescription with regard to controlled substances. Many online pharmacies, however, sell prescription drugs that are not controlled substances. These drug sales are 

regulated under the FD&C Act and require a valid prescription, 

but the FD&C Act does not define what constituents a valid prescription. In the online pharmacy context where numerous doctors 

and their respective customers are often located in different States, 

this can complicate criminal prosecution under the FD&C Act. 

Given the challenges and threats posed by an increasingly 

globalized marketplace, it is important that FDA regulatory and 

law enforcement partners and industry continue to work together 

to address the problem and threat of counterfeit drugs and that we 

continue to ensure authorities keep pace with the complex system 

that counterfeiters and traffickers take advantage of. We look forward to continuing to work together to achieve our shared goal of 

protecting American consumers. 

I would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sklamberg follows:] 

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. Sklamberg. 

Mr. Kubiak, you are now recognized for 5 minutes. 

TESTIMONY OF LEV KUBIAK 

Mr. KUBIAK. Good morning, Chairman Murphy, Ranking Member DeGette and distinguished subcommittee members, thank you 

very much for this opportunity to speak today about the efforts of 

ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and the Center that 

I run, the National Intellectual Property Rights Center. 

I currently serve as the Director of that Center. It is led by ICE, 

and the Center operates as a task force model comprised of 21 federal and international partners including FDA, which I am pleased 

to join today here on this panel. It is this collection of agencies 

partnered together pooling resources, expertise and authorities that 

makes the IPR Center truly unique and effectively. No subset of 

agencies has the individual capacity or capability to address the 

significant and growing threat of IP crime alone. The Center optimizes the effectiveness of each agency and provides a single location for industry collaboration and reporting. 

Can you put the second slide up, please? 

[Slide shown.] 

As the picture that you are about to see illustrates, our biggest 

challenge right now is that criminals now counterfeit and effectively market virtually any product with no regard to public health 

and safety, be it exploding airbags, as it represented in the right 

hand of the screen, to counterfeit industrial bearings used in 

mineshafts and mining equipment, to drugs without active ingredient, the callous nature of counterfeiting results in dangerous, 

even deadly outcomes. 

Another significant challenge we face is while ocean-crossing 

shipping containers are necessary for the bulk movement of quantities of counterfeit items like handbags, batteries or razor blades, 

other high-value items including counterfeit pharmaceuticals and 

semiconductors used by our United States military are being smuggled in thousands of smaller packages through mail and express 

courier packages. Next slide, please. 

[Slide shown.] 

As this slide shows, the Internet poses yet another significant 

challenge. Criminals operating unregulated Web sites, providing 

counterfeit pharmaceuticals continue to be a growing global phenomenon. In April 2013, Legit Script, an online pharmaceutical 

verification service, stated there were over 34,000 active rogue 

Internet pharmacies selling substandard, counterfeit or harmful 

prescription drugs. The screenshot you see here is from an actual 

criminal Web site that we seized as one of the 686 Web sites seized 

as a result of Operation Better Pill, a worldwide operation run by 

ICE through the IPR Center targeting the online sale of counterfeit 

illegal medicine. This Web site was run by a criminal organization 

based overseas and purported, as you can see, to be a legitimate 

Canadian health care facility. 

With this type of ambiguity, consumer fraud can run rampant. 

Next slide, please. 

[Slide shown.] 

31 

In early 2010, law enforcement authorities from the United Kingdom provided FDA information on an intercepted shipment of unapproved oncology drugs. The package, derived from Pakistan, was 

destined for California. Together, ICE, FDA, FBI, the U.S. Postal 

Service, and Customs and Border Protection collaborated on the investigation discovering that Martin Paul Bean of Florida ordered 

the unapproved drugs from foreign sources in Turkey, India and 

Pakistan and then sold those drugs to doctors in the United States 

at substantially reduced prices. In September, Bean was sentenced 

to 2 years’ incarceration for distributing more than $7 million 

worth of unapproved and misbranded oncology drugs through his 

illicit pharmaceutical scheme, significant harm caused by just one 

criminal. 

This case example on the screen illustrates our strategy, which 

is to attack the criminal network throughout the entire global supply chain from the point of manufacturer through shippers of illegal commodities to those that distribute the illegal drugs to 

unsuspecting people in need of effective medicine. This strategy requires a robust collaboration through our attach AE1e network 

with foreign counterparts where the majority of counterfeit items 

are made and through which they are transhipped en route to the 

United States and our trading partners worldwide. 

I know we are not going to be able to arrest and seize our way 

out of this growing problem, and that is why the IPR Center has 

committed significant effort to close collaboration with industry and 

education to the public. I do believe that we can reduce demand 

through education and I also believe that this is the most critical 

component of any long-term viable solution. Next slide, please. 

[Slide shown.] 

As part of our robust public education efforts, we have developed 

the IPR Center Web site, which includes information on efforts of 

all of our partner agencies and where they can report IP crime 

through our ‘‘report IP theft’’ button. Industry and other U.S. government agencies have joined the fight by placing the ‘‘report IP 

theft’’ button on their Web sites as well, now totaling more than 

100 industry and embassy Web sites worldwide, including this one 

from the Pharmaceutical Security Institute pictured on the screen. 

New leads to the Center have increased nearly 500 percent since 

fiscal year 2012 as a result of this. I encourage the members of this 

committee to visit our Web site, and I invite you to place our ‘‘report IP theft’’ button on your page as well. Recently we had Congressman Green visit the Center himself and we are working with 

his staff to do just that for his constituents. And I also welcome 

other members of this committee to visit the Center. It is one thing 

to hear about it; it is another to see it, and we are just across the 

river in Crystal City. 

Once again, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear 

before you today, and I am pleased to answer any questions you 

may have at this time. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Kubiak follows:] 

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Mr. MURPHY. I thank you both our witnesses today for giving us 

some honest, solid and somewhat chilling testimony of this huge 

public health risk. 

Mr. Sklamberg, in your video you showed Alli, that drug there. 

I had referenced something in my opening statement about an 

emergency room doctor in Texas ordering this drug from a rogue 

Internet pharmacy. Was that the same pharmacy, do you know? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I don’t believe it was the same one. 

Mr. MURPHY. But he suffered a stroke. Is that correct? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, the one you are referring to, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. MURPHY. And unfortunately, he wasn’t alone. I mean, many, 

many Americans, there are dozens of cases of death or serious injury suffered from these counterfeit, unapproved drugs from these 

rogue Internet pharmacy sites. Is that correct? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is correct, and in fact, the illnesses that 

we know about would severely understate what is actually happening because, as you pointed out, Mr. Chairman, and some of 

your colleagues have, a lot of times the patients who are receiving 

these drugs are already quite sick, so if you are taking Avastin and 

you have cancer, the Avastin, let’s say it is counterfeit and let’s say 

completely doesn’t work, it has no active ingredients, you may well 

end up dying from your cancer. The doctor who is giving you the 

Avastin might not know that, in fact, the Avastin was counterfeit 

and might think that you had died from your cancer despite getting 

real Avastin, and so it is very hard to establish the cause and effect. So what instances we have we think severely and absolutely 

understate the effect and the problem. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. Are you aware that the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and Legit Script indicate that 97 

percent of online pharmacies are actually rogue Web sites that operate in violation of federal law? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, I have seen that statistic. The number of 

them is astonishing. I believe the GAO report as well has a rather 

astonishing number. 

Mr. MURPHY. And my understanding is, when they don’t recover 

any prescription, that number may go closer to 100 percent. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It would go up. 

Mr. MURPHY. Are you aware that according to a report from the 

PartnershipforDrug-Free.org, one in six Americans, or 36 million 

people, have bought medication online without a valid prescription? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. 

Mr. MURPHY. And given all this, would it be fair to conclude 

there are probably millions and millions of Americans right now 

who have in their purse, their medicine cabinet, their pocket some 

significant safety risk of some medication that they may be taking 

today? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. There are millions of Americans now who may 

very well have what they think is medication but that in reality 

could make them very sick. 

Mr. MURPHY. While I am asking these questions, I went into an 

online pharmacy, and there’s cancer drugs here and hypertension 

and psychiatric drugs, et cetera. I could just tap a button here, buy 

these. No one is asking me any questions, and I would assume that 

48 

none of that is helpful. So this is really a major public health nightmare. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is a major and growing problem. 

Mr. MURPHY. Could the CD–3 device that the FDA is developing 

be made available to pharmacies or clinical settings or others to 

help spot counterfeit drugs? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Right now it is still in the early stages. We developed it a short time ago. We have something like about 25 of 

them now. There are, to put the number in perspective, 1.2 million 

international mail entries in the United States every day, so we 

have about 25 of these. We are testing them. We are working on 

agreements with private industry to scale it up. 

Mr. MURPHY. Just make sure that those aren’t counterfeit? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. No, this one is real. But they are an important tool because they can do kind of a quick test, but they are not 

a panacea for two reasons. First of all, in terms of building a criminal law enforcement case, it catches what you think is counterfeit. 

If you are actually going to build a criminal case, then you have 

to test it and send it to a lab and do that right because the criminal law has standards for evidence that are, you know, awfuly 

stringent. 

Mr. MURPHY. There are also spectrometers that test the chemical 

content, and we will probably hear about that from the second 

panel. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. 

Mr. MURPHY. Let me ask this. Heather Bresch, who is the CEO 

of Mylan Laboratories, which is headquartered in my district, has 

plants in the United States and India, and the New York Times recently stated that the increased regulatory scrutiny in India was 

long overdue. Do you agree that we need to have greater scrutiny 

in places like India and China, and what are the concerns about 

counterfeit drugs specifically related to India? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I would say that as the supply chain of both legitimate and counterfeit drugs grows and becomes more international, FDA has to step up its international presence, which is 

what we have been doing. So for the legitimate supply chain, we 

have been using the tools that you gave us in FDASIA, for example, with ways of defining risk more clearly, ways of keeping drugs 

out, to keep drugs that are suspected of being adulterated out. We 

have increased foreign presence and increased the number of foreign inspections, of the legitimate supply chain. 

We have to act aggressively in the legitimate supply chain when 

we encounter fraud that calls into question the integrity of the 

products, the integrity of the applications, and of course, as the legitimate industry grows, there is also the illegitimate industry 

around the world that is growing and what is happening that 

makes it particularly challenging for us from a law enforcement 

perspective is, it is no accident that in the counterfeit industry, it 

is developing in places where we do not have mutual legal assistance treaties, in places where we don’t have extradition agreements, and it makes it harder for us to investigate those folks if 

they are in a country where we don’t have the normal—we don’t 

have the avenues of federal criminal law enforcement cooperation 

that we do in some other countries. So they are smart, they are 

49 

careful, and what they are doing is evil, and so we have to, when 

we do catch them, be very aggressive and try to get penalties that 

will not only put the person in prison but send a very, very strong 

message. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. I hope some other members will follow 

up and get some more details and recommendations for Congress. 

I am out of time now, and turn to Ms. DeGette for 5 minutes. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Sklamberg, I just want to ask you quickly, it sounds like the 

penalties are too low for these counterfeiters, but on the other 

hand, if we increase the penalties, I want to make sure that that 

is going to have a deterrent effect. And I have a background before 

I came to Congress in criminal law, and one thing is that penalties 

don’t deter people unless they think there is a likelihood that they 

might get caught. So I want to ask you, under the current system, 

if Congress just increased penalties and did nothing else, would 

that solve the problem? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think obviously penalties are an important 

step in the process, and let me agree with you, Ranking Member 

DeGette, and particularly single out one penalty that is particularly low. Foreign unapproved drugs which pose the same public 

health risk as a counterfeit drug, they could be—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. I understand. I am sorry, I don’t have very much 

time. So if we increase those penalties, do you think that would 

defer people from counterfeiting those drugs? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think it would increase the frequency at which 

those cases are investigated. I think it would increase the frequency which—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. Because prosecutors would take it more seriously? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, and it would increase the penalties. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thanks. Now, do you think the problem of counterfeit drugs has gotten worse in recent years? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, and more sophisticated? 

Ms. DEGETTE. And what new methods are the counterfeiters 

using to evade detection? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. They are more effectively hiding their money 

around the world and they are more effectively using Web sites 

around the world, hundreds and hundreds of rogue Web sites 

linked together. They resemble international organized crime and 

they are using the tools of it. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. And that is why you think we need more serious investigation and prosecution? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. It is hard to prosecute international organized crime. 

Ms. DEGETTE. They are going to be more sophisticated on that 

end, and we have got to be more sophisticated. 

Can you talk to us for a minute about the Office of Drug Security, Integrity and Recalls, about when the office was created, what 

its mission is, and has it been successful in addressing the supply 

chain threat? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, the Office of Drug Supply, Integrity, and 

Recalls is part of the Center for Drugs’ Office of Compliance, which 

I used to be director of. That office, ODSIR, as it is called, was created in 2011, I believe, and the part it plays in this is, it is the 

50 

office charged with implementing the track-and-trace aspect of the 

DQSA, and number two, when we have a counterfeit incident, part 

of it is law enforcement, part of it is public health notification. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Right. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. So when we have an incident like with Avastin 

a couple of years ago, ODSIR sent out 1,500 letters to the medical 

community that note, here is a drug that you have that you think 

is Avastin that is actually a counterfeit. This protects patients, and 

also works to educate the medical community. 

Ms. DEGETTE. So do you think it is working, or could it be working better? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think it is working quite well, and of course, 

we always want it to work better. 

Ms. DEGETTE. And what could you do to make it work better? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would, and are, putting more resources into 

the problem, and we think working on implementing track and 

trace and further educating the medical community—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. Will help? OK. 

Mr. DINGELL. Would the gentlewoman yield? 

Ms. DEGETTE. I would love to yield to my friend, Mr. Dingell. 

Mr. MURPHY. Just so people could hear, his microphone wasn’t 

on, he is asking if you could submit to the committee what changes 

you would suggest that we make. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thank you. 

Now, I want to talk about resources for a minute because this 

FDA report that the chairman referenced in his opening statement 

says that the FDA is inspecting the foreign sites once every 9 years 

compared with the domestic sites every 2 years. Is that because of 

a lack of resources, Mr. Sklamberg? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That was a relic of the way the drug industry 

looked years ago. FDASIA has—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. No, no, I mean why only once every 9 years? Is 

that because of a lack of resources to do it? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That was the difficulty and expense of foreign 

inspections and the logistics. 

Ms. DEGETTE. So your answer is yes? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is more challenging to do foreign inspections 

than domestic ones. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. So what would the FDA need to do more frequent inspections? Would you need more resources to do that? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. As we have gotten more resources, we are able 

to increase the foreign inspections. 

Ms. DEGETTE. So do you have enough resources to do these foreign inspections at the regularity you think you need to do them? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We found that as the resources have increased 

with user fees, generic drug user fees, we have been able to increase it, so there is a direct relationship. 

Ms. DEGETTE. So answer my question, please. Do you have 

enough resources to be able to do these inspections with the regularity you think you need to do them? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We have the resources to do that now. The 

thing is, the situation is going to grow and grow and grow in the 

future as the percentage—— 

51 

Ms. DEGETTE. You may not have the resources in the future? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would have to evaluate that in the future, 

but the situation is growing. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. Thank you. 

I yield back. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentlelady yields back. I now recognize the 

vice chair of the full committee. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank 

you all for being with us today, and as you can see, it is an issue 

that we are all quite concerned about. 

Mr. Sklamberg, CSIP, are you familiar with the Center for Safe 

Internet Pharmacies? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I am. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. OK. Talk a little bit about who they are and 

how you are working with them, and just for the audience so that 

they will know, this is a group that is working Google, Go Daddy, 

IPEC, and trying to root out and keep some of these rogue Web 

sites out, and I would love to hear how you are interfacing with 

them because it seems as if they as an industry voluntarily are seeing some results. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. What we do with CSIP and with other 

folks in industry, be they credit card companies and others, is 

when we obtain information about a counterfeit or when industry 

does, they report it. Now, it is important that, for example, if it is 

a Web site, that the Web site be taken down; if it is a credit card 

company, that the credit account be disabled. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. Right. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is challenging. 

Ms. BLACKBURN. Right, and payment processors. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. And payment processors as well. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. They have to participate with it. Has Google 

using the AdWords program to permit only U.S.-based online pharmacies, has that been helpful? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Well, Google, as you know, entered into an 

agreement a couple of years ago where they forfeited $500 million 

because of the AdWord program had let in Canadian unapproved 

drugs. As a result of that, Google has been cooperating with us in 

our efforts. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. I think all of us have a tremendous amount of 

concern about the rogue Web sites and the rogue pharmacies and 

the damage that it does, and also the phishing and the data security issues, you know, it is just a really sticky ball of wax. So I am 

pleased to know that you are working with them and that you all 

are information sharing. Do you have the right authority to share 

information back and forth, or is there some changes that we 

should make to allow that? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We have authority but one of the things that is 

difficult is, just as an example, Internet service providers want to 

be cooperative with us, so we have all these Web sites. Right now 

we have to get grand jury subpoenas to obtain information that 

they want to give to us about Internet service providers. We don’t 

have an administrative subpoena authority targeted even to just 

Internet service providers. That is incredibly time-consuming and 

cumbersome for the Assistant United States Attorney who would 

52 

get the case and then for us, and it slows us down. We have to get 

court orders for some of our actions and subpoenas from others, 

and there would be a series of tools that we could get that would 

make these investigations move more quickly, and since we are 

dealing basically with organized crime, and that is what it is, organized crime using medicine, fake medicine, we have to have tools 

that are as fast as the criminals are. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. So as we look at data security and privacy 

issues, we need to review the elements that would allow you greater access and speed, a little bit of clarity? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think that would help. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. OK. Just as I have a little bit of time left, the 

botulinum issues, and I know everybody thinks in terms of just 

Botox but of course some of my researchers at our facilities in Tennessee, migraines, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy for children and they 

are using the drug there, and I know you all have had some processes in place dealing with the unlicensed suppliers of the botulinum and also your security supply chain pilot project. I am hopeful that you are seeing companies that are applying for this pilot. 

How many—— 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Twelve so far, and the program basically just 

started, so—— 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. And you can take up to 100? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is correct. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. OK. And in what countries are the companies 

located? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. A variety of countries. I don’t have the information. I can get that to you. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. I would like you to submit for the record just 

for our understanding as we go through and monitor it. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. And I think also we are going to want to look 

at the successes that you have in analyzing the project, how you 

are equating the variables, and then what you see as your 

deliverables from that project as we move forward. But thank you 

for the update. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Thank you. 

Mrs. BLACKBURN. And I will yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to get that to you. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentleman yields back, and I now recognize 

Mr. Waxman. 

Mr. DINGELL. Will the gentlewoman yield? 

Ms. BLACKBURN. I yield. 

Mr. DINGELL. Will you submit for the record the suggestions that 

you essentially were about to make to my colleague about what it 

is you need in the way of authority to address the questions that 

you were just describing? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to, sir. 

Mr. DINGELL. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. Now Mr. Waxman is recognized for 5 

minutes. 

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Sklamberg, Congress has made a number of changes to FDA 

law in the last year and a half that should help fight counterfeit 

53 

drugs. For example, the FDA Safety and Innovation Act increased 

the maximum prison time to 20 years for knowingly and intentionally selling a counterfeit drug or knowingly and intentionally 

adulterating a drug such that it has a reasonable probability of 

causing serious harm or death, and the Drug Quality and Security 

Act sets up a track-and-trace system that over the next 10 years 

should make it increasingly difficult for criminals to introduce 

counterfeit drugs into the drug supply. Can you tell us how useful 

these new laws have been? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. They have been quite useful, but of course, they 

don’t solve the entire problem. I will take track-and-trace as an example, which I want to thank this committee for its work on. 

Track-and-trace works when you have folks in the supply chain 

who want it to work, who want to look and see, is this a legitimate 

product that I’m dispensing or that I’m getting? What it doesn’t do 

is stop a couple of unscrupulous people or criminals who want to 

have a transaction together where they are selling a crooked product. So if you have a person outside the legitimate supply chain 

selling to another person outside the legitimate supply chain administering it to somebody, that is not what track-and-trace is intended for, and track-and-trace wouldn’t stop that. The increased 

penalties in FDASIA, Congressman Waxman, that you mentioned, 

are useful but there is still a major gap, and this is foreign, unapproved drugs, and they are as dangerous as counterfeits but you 

can use—in a criminal case—and I used to be a prosecutor, and one 

of the hard parts of it is, you have to prove what the person did 

and the mental state. So to get the counterfeit penalties, you have 

to prove that the person knew it was a counterfeit that they were 

selling and you have a conspiracy involving maybe dozens of people, hundreds of people, conceivably. We are not going to be able 

to arrest all of them. 

So you may be able to show that, for example, it is a foreign, unapproved drug and not a counterfeit. If you sell a foreign, unapproved drug and the government can’t prove fraud, which would 

often be the case because it is not purporting to be the U.S. drug, 

it is a foreign, unapproved drug, and a person gets sick and dies, 

that is a misdemeanor, even with the changes that were made over 

the last couple of years. If you are selling a dangerous product that 

causes a death, then the criminal penalty under federal law in that 

situation would be a misdemeanor. 

Now, if there is fraud, the penalties go up under the Food, Drug, 

and Cosmetic Act. There is also mail fraud, wire fraud, other statutes, but we have that gap. 

Mr. WAXMAN. I also mentioned in my opening statement that if 

you prove an intent to violate the law, which is necessary before 

you can win a criminal case for drug counterfeiting, then even if 

we win, the maximum penalty for some violations with potentially 

life-threatening consequences is only 3 years. Isn’t that correct? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, for 

fraud, it would be 3. Specifically for counterfeit, it is higher. But 

again, counterfeit versus foreign unapproved from a public health 

consequence, there is really often not much of a difference. 

Mr. WAXMAN. So what impact do these weak penalties have on 

our ability to deter drug counterfeiting? 

54 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. They do significantly. I mean, even at the front 

end. When a case is presented to a federal prosecutor who has 200 

other investigations and they have narcotics conspiracies, public 

corruption, fraud, they are also looking at this. It is not an area 

of law they have seen before, and if an agent comes to them and 

says here is a case and they are looking and they will say, well the 

penalty is 1 year or 3 years, so I can do an investigation, take 2 

years, put the other cases in the back of my file cabinet, and as 

I look at the federal code is, and the federal is Congress’s priority 

for the crime, it is 3 years, the penalty that was in place since 

1938. Rationally, that prosecutor is going to look at this and say 

should I prioritize this, and I am not faulting that prosecutor. That 

would have been my calculus. And it affects the whole system and 

kind of what drives the priorities in the whole system. 

Mr. WAXMAN. Well, as my colleagues have mentioned, we need 

your recommendations for what additional tools you need to help 

prevent these kinds of actions and to discover such actions and to 

punish these actions, so we will look forward to getting further recommendations from you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. MURPHY. In anticipating Mr. Dingell’s question, details of 

that to this committee would be most welcome of all those processes Mr. Waxman asked for. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. And my answer is the same: we would be glad 

to. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. I am learning from the master. We 

only have a few months left of him, so we are all trying to learn 

from him. 

I now recognize the vice chair of the subcommittee, Dr. Burgess, 

for 5 minutes. 

Mr. BURGESS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Sklamberg, I just really want to underline the point you just 

made, because on the penalty aspect, there is the deterrent, and 

then from a prosecutor’s perspective, there is the priority, and we 

are damaging ourselves on both sides. We are not really providing 

a deterrent to the criminal, and then on the other side, we are not 

really prioritizing it or getting that impetus to the prosecutor. Did 

I understand you correctly? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is correct, Dr. Burgess. 

Mr. BURGESS. And you think that changing that certainly would 

alter the priority from a priority standpoint at the prosecutorial 

level? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It would make it easier for FDA to present 

those cases to prosecutors, yes. 

Mr. BURGESS. Now, I do want to also go back to something that 

Ms. DeGette was saying on whether or not you have the funding 

that you need to inspect foreign sites. My understanding with the 

user fee agreement that was reauthorized in 2012 that we gave 

you, the FDA, the authority, you go where you need to go, you stay 

as long as you need to stay. Is my understanding correct? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is correct. One thing that we did in the 

last round of the user fee negotiations is went to a goal of parity 

of foreign and domestic inspections. So our foreign inspection numbers go up every year, and they are going to move up to get into 

55 

line with what the reality is. And of course, in the next round of 

user fee negotiations, I am sure we will look at what funding would 

be appropriate at that time. 

Mr. BURGESS. And I also presume that during that time you will 

provide the committee with feedback as to the utility of that flexibility which the law, the committee enabled you to have the last 

time this was reauthorized. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, we would do that. 

Mr. BURGESS. I will also point out, it was probably prior to your 

time with the agency, but Mr. Sharfstein came to this committee 

in 2007 or 2008, and in response to that same question, perhaps 

asked by another member, his answer was, we have everything we 

need. 

So look, I have been on this committee for 10 years. I understand 

how this threat has changed, how the globalization of our economy 

has in fact affected your ability to do your work within our shores. 

So I appreciate the fact that it is an evolving process, but as Mr. 

Dingell has pointed out, we need your feedback so that we can help 

you keep up with the threat as it emerges. No one knew back in 

1998 when some of these stories were first being written the degree 

to which it would evolve today. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, and that is why when we have the reauthorization of the user fees, I am sure, FDA and the committee will 

be engaged. 

Mr. BURGESS. But don’t wait. Let us know along the way. 

Now, Ms. Blackburn was talking, and I didn’t realize this, you 

have an agreement with Google about online pharmacies? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. There was, I believe it was in 2011, Google entered into a non-prosecution agreement where they forfeited $500 

million, and as part of that, they established a compliance program. 

Mr. BURGESS. Well, I don’t want to speak out of school, but I just 

typed in ‘‘cheap Viagra’’ to Google, and you get a lot of sites. Now, 

the House server won’t let me go to any of them, but just so you 

know, I am not sure that is working all that well. You might want 

to check it out when you get to a non-House server location. 

I do need to ask you this. In 2008, this subcommittee had a big 

investigation on, it was an active pharmaceutical ingredient in the 

drug thinner heparin imported from China, and it had been contaminated with a product called hypersulfated chondroitin sulfate, 

if I recall correctly, and this product that was adulterating the heparin not only didn’t thin the blood, it killed the patients. So it was 

a real troublesome aspect of that contamination. I don’t feel like we 

have ever received the resolution of that that we should have, so 

can I just ask you today from the FDA’s perspective, is this still 

an open and ongoing investigation or have we just simply said we 

are never going to get to the bottom of this? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I would have to get back to you, Dr. Burgess, 

if I may, on that. 

Mr. BURGESS. I wish you would. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I mean, there is an aspect of it that is open but 

I want to make sure about that. I know committee counsel has 

been engaged with FDA on this issue. 

56 

Mr. BURGESS. And I would just make the point again that this 

molecule, hypersulfated chondroitin sulfate, was actually patented 

in China. I believe this was criminal attempt before the act occurred, and as a consequence, American patients were killed, and 

from the perspective of a physician, you think of somebody in a dialysis center flushing a line with heparin in a dialysis patient and 

they died right after that, I mean, that is something they are going 

to have to live with for the rest of their lives, so this is not a small 

and inconsequential thing. We make jokes about Viagra. But this 

was a terribly significant event in the lives of patients and physicians and nurses across this country. I really don’t want to see us 

not resolve this problem. 

So Mr. Chairman, I thank you for the time and I will yield back. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentleman yields back. I now recognize Mr. 

Dingell for 5 minutes. 

Mr. DINGELL. Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your courtesy, and 

I commend you for this hearing. This is a very important hearing, 

and I think you have conducted it with extraordinary skill. I want 

to welcome a little later Dr. Prashant Yadav, which is a constituent 

of mine from the University of Michigan, who will be testifying on 

another panel. I am sorry I may not be able to be here to hear him. 

Now, the Congress has taken some remarkable steps under the 

leadership of this subcommittee and this committee, giving FDA 

the authority they need by passing the FDA Safety and Innovation 

Act, which contained a number of provisions from my Drug Safety 

Enhancement Act, and most recently the Drug Quality and Security Act, and I think that we can all be proud of what we have 

done, but as indicated this morning, you pointed out that more can 

be done. 

So answer if you please yes or no. One of the oldest challenges 

facing this Nation is the globalized nature of our drug supply 

chain. Commissioner, is it correct that 40 percent of the pharmaceuticals and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients 

are made in foreign countries, yes or no? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. 

Mr. DINGELL. You also have a big problem with some of the raw 

materials that later go into some of these pharmaceuticals in their 

finished form, do you not? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, that is correct. 

Mr. DINGELL. You won’t have time to answer this, but would you 

submit to us a brief comment as to whether you have authority to 

get at those people who manufacture and ship these into the 

United States and what additional authorities you need. The FDA 

Safety and Innovation Act gave your agency new authorities such 

as registration of foreign drug facilities and mandatory detention to 

help the agency deal with globalized drug supply chain. Is your authority there sufficient and what more is required, if you please, 

and answer that for the record. 

Now, Commissioner, does FDA need additional authorities to 

keep Americans safe from counterfeit and substandard drugs that 

are coming in from abroad? Yes or no. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Additional authorities would help us do the job. 

Mr. DINGELL. Would you please define in a written response for 

inclusion in the record what is required there? 

57 

Now, Commissioner, does FDA have the resources it needs to 

carry out the new authorities granted to the agency in the FDA 

Safety and Innovation Act? Yes or no. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We found that additional funding has helped us 

implement statutes like FDASIA. 

Mr. DINGELL. Would you please submit to us what is needed 

there? 

I happen to believe one key reason that counterfeit and substandard drugs are still a public health problem in the United 

States is the penalties are not sufficient to deter criminals from engaging in this activity. We seem to have an agreement on this. I 

am wondering if we should make the penalties which we collect be 

turned over to Food and Drug for additional enforcement. We do 

that on narcotics. Would this be helpful, and would you submit additional comments on how that would work to assist you with your 

business? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to. 

Mr. DINGELL. Now, Commissioner, the maximum penalty you 

mentioned for these activities is only $10,000 or 3 years in prison. 

What should it be, and please define that by relating it to other 

questions involving narcotics and other events which are essentially similar? Would you submit that for the record? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We would be glad to. 

Mr. DINGELL. Now, Commissioner, is it correct that a Utah man 

was recently convicted of shipping over $5 million in unapproved 

drugs but received only a 1-year prison sentence? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. That is correct. 

Mr. DINGELL. It seems rather contemptible. 

Now, Commissioner, does FDA support strong civil monetary 

penalties against those charged with misbranding or counterfeiting 

drugs? Yes or no. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We have in the past, I believe, but we can get 

back to you on that. 

Mr. DINGELL. I would like to have something on the record. This 

reminds me of some great lines from Gilbert and Sullivan where 

the emperor indicated that it was his purpose so sublime to make 

the punishment fit the crime, and it would seem that this committee might want to do something of that sort today, and with 

your guidance, I think we can do it. 

Mr. Chairman and my colleagues, I thank you. You have been 

very gracious to me this morning. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you for also not singing those lines. We appreciate that. 

I now recognize Mr. Griffith from Virginia for 5 minutes. 

Mr. GRIFFITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate a lot 

of the questions that have been asked today. Let me ask some 

questions. I agree that we ought to figure out how we need to do 

this. 

In regard to the situation that Mr. Dingell just mentioned in 

Utah, was the gentleman charged with any other crimes as a part 

of his scheme? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I don’t recall right now. Maybe I can get back 

to you if we can go ahead with another question. 

58 

Mr. GRIFFITH. That will be fine, because previously you correctly 

stated that a lot of times there are other charges that can be 

brought and that those may carry additional time, and so I guess 

what I would ask you is, is that since law enforcement can bring 

other wire fraud, mail fraud, whatever other charges, are you seeing that prosecutors are looking at that and raising up the priority 

on these crimes, and do we need to look at raising the penalties 

or do we just need to encourage prosecutors to go forward on all 

fronts as opposed to just one? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think what is happening, Congressman Griffith, is that when the case is initially presented to the prosecutor, 

they are not going to know whether they are going to be able to 

prove the fraud. So if they prove fraud, mail fraud’s maximum penalty is 20 years, wire fraud is 20 years. If I sell you a fake Rolex 

and mail it to you, I am getting hammered. But they don’t know 

if they’re going to be able to prove that, and that is going to require 

a lengthy, years’ long grand jury investigation. 

Mr. GRIFFITH. So that is what discourages the prosecutions? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Up front. Now, they are going to stack the 

charges the best they can if they prove it. 

Mr. GRIFFITH. Sure. Now, obviously you have got a better shot 

with somebody in Utah of apprehending the individual than you do 

if they are from some foreign nation. Do you think that there is a 

better chance of collecting if we raise the penalties or the civil penalties and criminal penalties on the financial side more than the 

prison time, would that have a greater impact on the foreign imports? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think enhancing, for example, asset forfeiture 

and seizure would make a big effect because we can then take the 

money, which would have a big effect, deterrence, and also just reducing the upside of engaging in the criminal activity in the first 

place. 

Mr. GRIFFITH. And I would agree that a lot of times that helps 

law enforcement in other fields and maybe this is one of those 

areas where we need to agree with Mr. Dingell when he said that 

perhaps we need to see that the enforcement agency gets at least 

a portion of those funds back to help them go after other bad actors 

in this area. I do appreciate that. 

Let me ask you this, because you talked earlier about the 

prioritization of the various crimes by a prosecutor. If we raise 

these penalties up, at what point do we then deprioritize something 

else that we may consider important? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I refer you to the Department of Justice. No, obviously that always is a problem, and to a prosecutor, every case 

is like their baby. But these are ones, I think because they are not 

common. Prosecutors or white-collar prosecutors will see mail fraud 

cases a lot, typical ones. They will see an odometer rollback case 

much more than they would see a counterfeit drug case. We will 

present the public health risk and we will convince them, and we 

are not saying Department of Justice is not cooperative; they are. 

It is just that the maximum punishments reflect Congress’s sense 

of the priority, and you go into court, you have a trial. We have 

a case of an unapproved oncology drug. It was a trial, I believe, late 

last year. The person was convicted of over 20 misdemeanors, and 

59 

they were just misdemeanors. And to a rational prosecutor, do you 

want to spend a couple of years investigating what turned out to 

be a misdemeanor? 

Mr. GRIFFITH. Sure. Let me switch gears, and I know it is not 

your area of jurisdiction but I would ask you to take the message 

back. We have been talking about FDA’s authority over the drug 

supply chain, the Drug Quality and Security Act. That also had in 

it an issue of compounded drugs. Again, I know it is not your jurisdiction but I am continuing to follow the FDA’s regulation activities 

in that area, and I would remind the agency that the DQSA was 

supposed to preserve the status quo when it comes to compounding 

drugs for office use and the repackaging of sterile drugs. Unfortunately, we are starting to see some reports that indicate that warning letters are being sent to prohibit these activities by traditional 

pharmacies, which were going on before we passed the bill and 

there was kind of an agreement between the House and the Senate 

that we would leave that as the status quo. So if you could just 

take it back and just tell them we will keep monitoring this, but 

I am concerned about that. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. OK. 

Mr. GRIFFITH. I appreciate the work you are doing, and this 

hearing has been great. Thank you for your testimony, and I yield 

back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Thank you, sir. 

Mr. MURPHY. I now recognize Mr. Johnson for 5 minutes. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen, thank 

you for your testimony here today. 

A large percentage of the people that I represent in eastern and 

southeastern Ohio are seniors, and often with limited and fixed incomes. There are many seniors who struggle with the cost of prescription drugs, and I have heard from some individuals who look 

to purchase drugs from Canada as a way to achieve drastic savings 

on their prescriptions. But I also have concerns about these practices and how to protect seniors from illegal pharmacies that may 

be distributing dangerous drugs and playing on their need to save. 

So can you clarify the legality of seniors purchasing drugs either 

in person or online form Canada in order to achieve savings? Is 

this a legal practice? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is not a legal practice. 

Mr. JOHNSON. It is not a legal practice? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is not legal. 

Mr. JOHNSON. It is not legal? OK. Thank you. 

Are most Internet pharmacies that purport to be in Canada actually not in Canada or certainly not providing drugs that originated 

in Canada? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We found many, many online pharmacies that 

purport to be Canadian that are not Canadian, and it is a ruse that 

is used because a lot of vulnerable Americans and people who are 

very sick, seniors, they will think well, Canada, that is safe, and 

it turns out it is not Canada, it is someplace like we saw in the 

videos. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Right. OK. Didn’t FDA’s Operation Bait and 

Switch survey show that about 85 percent of the online pharmacies 

were not from Canada? Is that true? 

60 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I don’t remember the exact statistic but the 

number is very high. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Can you verify that back to me, please? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is correct, 85 percent. 

Mr. JOHNSON. OK. Great. I am not a lawyer, but I don’t typically 

ask questions I don’t already know the answer to. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Well, happily I had someone with me who could 

answer that. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you. Last year, the FDA worked with international regulatory and law enforcement agencies to shut down 

more than 1,600 illegal pharmacy Web sites. Is it true that most 

of the Web sites represented themselves as Canadian pharmacies 

claiming that the medicines that they sold were FDA approved or 

brand-name drugs, which they were not? Is that also true? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I believe that many of them were. I am not sure 

if it is the majority. Yes. 

Mr. JOHNSON. OK. Thank you. 

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. Johnson? 

Mr. DINGELL. Will the gentleman yield quickly? And I apologize 

to him. 

This is a very excellent point. Would you submit something for 

the record so that we have something that would tell us what 

would assist the gentleman in understanding and help me to understand what is going on? And I will ask unanimous consent that 

the gentleman get the time back that I have taken from him. 

Mr. JOHNSON. My pleasure, Mr. Chairman. 

Even in the instance of an online pharmacy actually being in 

Canada, haven’t some of these Internet pharmacies come under 

criminal investigation? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Correct. 

Mr. JOHNSON. All right. Well, shifting gears here just for a second, let me see if I can get through this next one. 

In 2005, five teenage boys from three different States died after 

ingesting raw DXM powder that they bought in bulk from an online source. All of these tragic deaths were linked to the same 

Internet supplier operating out of Indianapolis where two men 

bought the drug in bulk from India, repacked it and sold it over 

the Internet. Investigators estimated they made $70,000 on sales 

of the misbranded drug into interstate commerce. This is every parent’s worst nightmare. These three incidences have been the subject of scrutiny by this committee in the past when Chairman 

Upton introduced legislation on the matter in 2009, and I am proud 

to continue his work on the matter along with my colleague, Mr. 

Braley, through the introduction of the PACT Act, which would ensure that only legitimate entities registered with the FDA or comparable State agencies can purchase raw, bulk DXM. But there are 

still questions to be answered. 

How did these young men obtain this drug online? How easy is 

it still for teens to purchase bulk drugs online in order to abuse the 

substances they get? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. It is very easy to purchase drugs online, whether it be teens or adults, and teens are better at using the Internet 

than adults. 

61 

Mr. JOHNSON. That is true. How prevalent are similar circumstances to the one I just described? How prevalent are they 

today in your experience and what you guys are seeing? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. We don’t have a number specifically on teens 

versus adults but I would say it would stand to reason that that 

problem is prevalent. 

Mr. JOHNSON. And it is growing. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. As the whole problem is, I would think so. 

Mr. JOHNSON. What is being done to protect our Nation’s young 

people and crack down on the illegal online drug sales targeting 

those who aim to abuse the substances? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. This would be part of our larger effort regarding 

rogue Internet pharmacies and foreign, unapproved drugs and 

counterfeit drugs, and obviously we prioritize more vulnerable victims in how we look at cases. So it would be part of that effort and 

obviously a very important part of it. 

Mr. JOHNSON. OK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. I now recognize Mr. Long for 5 minutes. 

Mr. LONG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for 

being here today and for your testimony. 

Mr. Sklamberg, we asked you for a lot of things here today, a lot 

of questions we have of you, but a question I have for you is, if you 

were going to say the top three things that you need from us, that 

you need from Congress—now, you rolled your eyes, so I don’t 

know what that means. But what can we do to help this dire situation? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I wasn’t rolling my eyes. I was thinking of—— 

Mr. LONG. When I first ran for office, my political people said 

that I did that and they told me not to do that. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Oh, OK. 

Mr. LONG. I still do it. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I have never won an election nor run for office. 

There are a series of things that I think would help us. One is, 

we talked about increased penalties, we talked about increased authorities. 

Mr. LONG. Let me step you on that one. I had to step out of the 

room for a moment, and I don’t know if I missed it or not, but what 

was the upshot of the video we saw, the gentleman on there that 

had this huge operation and apparently was induced to come to the 

United States after 7 months of communication? What was the 

final upshot of that? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I don’t remember what the ultimate disposition 

of the case was. He was arrested and sentenced but I don’t know 

what the sentence was exactly. Oh, 87 months’ imprisonment. 

Mr. LONG. OK. I interrupted you. Number one is larger sentences. Number two? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes. Now, that is one where we were able to 

prove the crime set at the higher penalties so ones I had mentioned 

before where we were unable to prove counterfeit drugs or fraud, 

then you end up with misdemeanors. So I think some of the increased enforcement tools we talked about, asset forfeiture, we 

talked about seizure, we talked about authority for us to obtain 

records that would be useful in these cases. I think that for us, we 

62 

are working with our foreign regulatory partners to enhance international cooperation, so that is more that FDA is doing, because as 

this international organized crime activity grows, that is something 

we have to do. 

Mr. LONG. Are we getting more cooperation? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. From certain locations. It is sporadic, and as I 

had mentioned, I think, to one of your colleagues, international organized crime is clever and so they are going to situate themselves 

in places that have minimal cooperation with the United States, 

which makes detection harder and then makes investigation and 

apprehension and punishment harder on the back end. 

Now, there are lots of countries we have very cooperative relationships with and their law enforcement. 

Mr. LONG. Let us know what we can do to help you in those instances, if you will. 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. Yes, sir. 

Mr. LONG. And I would like to yield the balance of my time to 

my friend, Dr. Burgess, from Texas. 

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for the time. 

Mr. Sklamberg and Mr. Kubiak, a question to both of you, but 

really an observation. What is the main driver here? It is the ability to make money, and of course, we know people make money in 

illicit drug trade all the time, but in this instance, you can do a 

counterfeit drug and no one is shooting at you on the border so in 

some ways it is a safer occupation for someone who wants to work 

on the wrong side of the law, and then as you pointed out, the penalties are not all that great. 

Prior to the passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, 

you did see the news stories of large amounts of seniors getting on 

buses and going to Canada to shop for their medications. I don’t 

know if you are aware of it, but the Affordable Care Act, which 

began working one way or another on January 1st, individuals now 

buying the individual market, a bronze plan, back in my home 

State of Texas, a deductible is $6,000. So people who have been 

used to receiving their medications where something is paid for by 

the insurance company now find themselves on the hook for a big 

part of that out-of-pocket expense. Some might even argue they are 

functionally uninsured when it comes to their prescription drug 

benefit. Are you prepared—what is going to be the natural tendency of someone who needs whatever, Crestor, Lipitor, and now 

they are having to pay the full out-of-pocket freight or the full 

freight for the cost of that medication, are they now likely to seek 

a lower cost on a ready device like their iPad or their laptop? 

Mr. KUBIAK. Sir, yes, I think they are likely to seek that. I think 

the challenge, though, is they need to understand who they are 

buying it from and—— 

Mr. BURGESS. I have no quarrel with that, and I don’t mean to 

interrupt you but the time is about to expire. Are you preparing 

yourself for the fact that there is the possibility that this type of 

activity may increase and may increase significantly for a population where historically it hasn’t been happening? 

Mr. KUBIAK. Congressman, I think across the board we have 

been preparing ourselves for an increase in continued growth unfortunately in this program and this problem over time, and as we 

63 

deal with that and deal with these illegal Internet pharmacy sites, 

we are trying robustly through education and also through enforcement to shut down and close out those opportunities to purchase 

those that are not secure sites. 

Mr. BURGESS. I am just not sure you recognize what is coming 

your way, and I wanted to warn you what is right over the horizon 

because people are going to act in their own self-interest when they 

are faced with those questions. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will yield back. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentleman yields. Yes, Mr. Dingell? 

Mr. DINGELL. I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman’s time 

be extended for 1 minute, and I would ask that the gentleman yield 

to me. 

Mr. BURGESS. I knew there was a catch. 

Mr. MURPHY. I will tell you what, Mr. Chairman, I have one follow-up question so I will give you a minute and I will give myself 

a minute. 

Mr. DINGELL. I will yield to you, Mr. Chairman. You are more 

important than I am in this place. 

Mr. MURPHY. Well, thank you. Let me start with mine and then 

I will yield the rest to you. 

I want to ask Mr. Kubiak just as a follow-up, are there any legal 

barriers that constrain you in sharing information with foreign government partners and cooperating with efforts against counterfeit 

drugs? 

Mr. KUBIAK. Sir, collectively, with all the agencies that are represented at the Center, we have quite a broad capability. Individually, each of the agencies has different capabilities to share. So for 

instance, within Homeland Security investigation, ICE, my parent 

organizations, we have the broad ability to share information with 

our customs counterparts around the world through customs mutual assistance agreements, which are outside of the normal mutual legal assistance treaties that normally are required and that 

Mr. Sklamberg talked about earlier in the day. We do have very 

broad authority to share, and combined, I think we have those authorities and those capabilities that we need to do that. 

I would also suggest just if I may that an increase in the minimum mandatory sentence, an enhancement, if you will, for pharmaceuticals, for those engaged in the sale of illegal or unapproved 

drugs would be a significant improvement as well. We see kind of 

across the board that absent that increase in minimum mandatory 

sentence, an ability to hold those people more accountable that are 

engaged in the life-threatening activity would greatly enhance our 

capability to hold people accountable and also be a major deterrent. 

Mr. MURPHY. Two things we will have to be addressing. One is 

the severity of punishment and second is the certainty of punishment. 

I will yield a minute to Mr. Dingell 

Mr. DINGELL. I thank my friend. 

Has there ever been an international conference on this kind of 

thing so that we could get everybody together so we could all pull 

in the same direction? 

64 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. There have been through a variety of vehicles. 

The World Health Organization, for example, has been involved in 

this. 

Mr. DINGELL. Would something of this kind be useful again, 

given the way things are changing? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. There is an established mechanism in the 

World Health Organization to deal with this issue and some other 

foreign ones. FDA is pursuing that aggressively. 

Mr. DINGELL. All right. My next concern here is the hard fact, 

and that is, you have difficulty with the funding of your agency. If 

you could get the funding of your agency to do as it has done by 

the drug enforcement people where the proceeds of the stuff that 

is used in this could be seized and utilized for either sale so that 

you could get revenue or so that you could get other help, would 

that be of assistance to you in terms of increasing your levels of 

funding to deal with these kinds of questions? 

Mr. SKLAMBERG. I think if I could get back to you on the record 

for that. 

Mr. DINGELL. I would rather have you do that after you have had 

a chance to think about it. 

Mr. Chairman, you have again been most courteous. Thank you. 

Mr. MURPHY. The gentleman yields back, and with that, I really 

want to thank our two distinguished panelists. Mr. Sklamberg and 

Mr. Kubiak, you have been most helpful in giving us information. 

We will look forward to getting your follow-up information as soon 

as you can to this committee so we can take action from there. 

Thank you. 

With that, those two witnesses are dismissed and I would like to 

ask the next set of witnesses on the second panel to come forward, 

and while you are coming forward and taking your seat, I will introduce the panelists. Dr. Marcia Crosse is the Director of Health 

Care at the United States Government Accountability Office. We 

are also joined by Dr. Prashant Yadav, who is here on behalf of the 

Institute of Medicine. He is the Director of their Health Care Research Initiative. He is also the director of the William Davidson 

Institute at the University of Michigan. We would also like to welcome Mr. John Clark, who is the Vice President and the Chief Security Officer of Global Security in the Compliance Division at 

Pfizer Incorporated, and our other panelist is Mr. Jean-Luc 

Moreau, the Head of Product Security at Novartis Corporation. Mr. 

Bruce Longbottom is the Assistant General Counsel at Eli Lilly 

and Company, and Ms. Elizabeth Jungman is the Director of Drug 

Safety and Innovation at Pew Charitable Trusts. 

So if the witnesses are ready, I will prepare to swear all of you 

in. You are aware that the committee is holding an investigative 

hearing, and when doing so has the practice of taking testimony 

under oath. Do any of you have any objections to testifying under 

oath? All the witnesses say they do not. The Chair then advises 

you that under the rules of the House and the rules of the committee, you are entitled to be advised by counsel. Do any of the 

panelists today desire to be advised by counsel during testimony? 

And all of the panelists say no. In that case, if you would all please 

rise and raise your right hand, and I will swear you in. 

[Witnesses sworn.] 

65 

Mr. MURPHY. So now you are all under oath and subject to the 

penalties set forth in Title XVIII, section 1001 of the United States 

Code. You may now each give a 5-minute summary of your written 

statement. 

We will begin with Dr. Crosse for 5 minutes. 

TESTIMONY OF MARCIA CROSSE, PH.D., DIRECTOR OF 

HEALTH CARE, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE; PRASHANT YADAV, PH.D., M.B.A., DIRECTOR OF 

HEALTH CARE RESEARCH INITIATIVE, DIRECTOR OF THE 

WILLIAM DAVIDSON INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; 

JOHN P. CLARK, VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, GLOBAL SECURITY, COMPLIANCE DIVISION, PFIZER, 

INC.; JEAN-LUC MOREAU, GLOBAL HEAD OF PRODUCT SECURITY, NOVARTIS CORPORATION; BRUCE LONGBOTTOM, 

PH.D., ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL, ELI LILLY AND COMPANY; AND ELIZABETH JUNGMAN, J.D., M.P.H., DIRECTOR OF 

DRUG SAFETY AND INNOVATION, PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS 

TESTIMONY OF MARCIA CROSSE 

Ms. CROSSE. Thank you. 

Chairman Murphy, Ranking Member DeGette and members of 

the subcommittee, I am pleased to be here today as you discuss the 

danger posed by counterfeit drugs. 

As we have just heard, one source of counterfeit drugs is Internet 

pharmacies. While some Internet pharmacies are legitimate businesses that offer consumers a safe, convenient and cost-effective 

way to obtain their medications, many are criminal enterprises 

that defraud consumers and deny patients effective treatments. Socalled rogue Internet pharmacies often sell counterfeit prescription 

drugs, sell drugs that have not been approved for sale in the 

United States, sell drugs that are substandard and have no therapeutic value, and sell drugs that are harmful to consumers. Drugs 

sold by rogue Internet pharmacies have been found to contain too 

much, too little, or no active pharmaceutical ingredient, or the 

wrong active pharmaceutical ingredient. Even worse, these drugs 

may contain dangerous contaminants such as paint, heavy metals, 

or poison. Despite the risks, FDA reports that nearly one in four 

U.S. adults who shop online have purchased prescription drugs 

from Internet pharmacies. 

Although the exact number of rogue Internet pharmacies is unknown and can change daily, one estimate suggests that there are 

over 36,000 in operation, up from an estimated 34,000 less than a 

year ago. Most operate from abroad. They illegally ship prescription drugs into the United States, sell drugs without a prescription 

and make efforts to evade scrutiny by Customs officials. A recent 

analysis by NABP, the professional organization for the State 

Boards of Pharmacy, shows that 97 percent of the Internet pharmacies it reviewed were out of compliance with laws or industry 

standards. 

Rogue Internet pharmacies are often complex operations, and 

federal agencies face substantial challenges investigating and prosecuting those involved. Piecing together these operations can be difficult because they may be composed of thousands of related Web 

66 

sites and operators take steps to disguise their identities. The ease 

with which operators can set up and take down rogue Web sites 

also makes it difficult for agencies to identify, track, and monitor 

them because Web sites can be created, modified, or deleted in a 

matter of minutes. 

The global nature of rogue Internet pharmacy operations complicates federal investigations. These Web sites and their operators 

are often located in countries that are unable or unwilling to aid 

U.S. agencies, with components of the operations scattered in several countries. If the clerk would show our first figure? 

[Slide shown.] 

This shows one rogue Internet pharmacy that registered its domain name in Russia, used Web site servers located in China and 

Brazil, processed payments through a bank in Azerbaijan, and 

shipped its prescription drugs from India. 

Rogue Internet pharmacies use sophisticated marketing methods 

to appear legitimate. This makes it hard for consumers to differentiate between legitimate and rogue sites. Some rogue sites seek to 

assure consumers of the safety of their drugs by purporting to be 

Canadian despite being located elsewhere or selling drugs sourced 

from other countries. They may also fraudulently display an NABP 

logo on their Web site despite not having earned the accreditation. 

Our second figure, if the clerk would post it, shows a Web site 

that may appear to consumers to be legitimate but the operators 

of this site pled guilty to multiple federal offenses including smuggling counterfeit drugs into the United States. 

Even when such operations are uncovered, the Department of 

Justice may not prosecute because of competing priorities and the 

complexity of these operations. Rogue Internet pharmacy activity 

clearly violates the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, but as 

we have heard, proving violations can be difficult and violations are 

subject to relatively light criminal penalties, a maximum of 3 years 

in jail or a fine of $10,000, or both. 

When federal prosecutors do pursue such cases, they often charge 

operators with violations of other laws such as smuggling, mail 

fraud, wire fraud, or money laundering since these violations can 

be less onerous to prove and carry stronger penalties, up to 20 to 

30 years in jail and fines up to a million dollars. 

In summary, while federal agencies have conducted investigations that have led to convictions, fines and asset seizures, rogue 

Internet pharmacies continue to provide a convenient mechanism 

for criminals to sell counterfeit drugs or substandard prescription 

drugs to U.S. consumers with a low probability of being prosecuted. 

Mr. Chairman, this completes my prepared statement. I would be 

happy to respond to any questions that you or other members of 

the subcommittee may have. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Crosse follows:] 

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Doctor. 

I now recognize Dr. Yadav. Am I pronouncing that correctly, sir? 

Mr. YADAV. Yes. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. You are recognized for 5 minutes. 

TESTIMONY OF PRASHANT YADAV 

Mr. YADAV. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member 

DeGette and members of the committee, my name is Prashant 

Yadav. I am the Director of the Health Care Research Initiative at 

the William Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan, and 

I served as a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on 

understanding the global public health problem of counterfeit, falsified and substandard medicines. 

The Food and Drug Administration had commissioned this study 

in 2011 to advance what at that time was a stymied public discourse on the topic of pharmaceutical crime. After deliberating and 

hearing public testimony for most of 2012, our committee released 

our findings and recommendations last year. I was also a member 

of another committee of the Institute of Medicine, which was on 

regulatory capacity building in developing countries. This study 

was also commissioned by the FDA Office of International Programs, and it dealt with questions more broadly of food and drug 

safety regulations and globalization. I would like to submit for your 

records copies the two mentioned IOM reports as well as the executive summaries of the two reports and an editorial on this topic. 

These documents discuss how improving the quality of medicines 

in this country depends to some extent on better medicine regulation abroad. These reports offer several suggestions as to how different federal agencies and international organizations can work 

together to improve global drug safety. 

In my testimony, I will be using language which is consistent 

with the IOM report. The members of our committee chose to be 

clear that we saw two rough categories of dangerous medicines. 

First, we have falsified drugs, those that carry a false representation of identity or source or both. The other main category is substandard, meaning the medicines that fail to meet our national 

quality standards. We recognized that often these two categories 

overlap. But we felt that thinking about these two categories separately helps us characterize the causes of the problems and the solutions for them in a precise manner. We also agreed not to describe the drugs as counterfeit, because we felt this term tends to 

hold back discussion. Many speakers who use the term ‘‘counterfeit’’ use it to imply something more broad than the narrow legal 

word ‘‘counterfeit.’’ The difference in these two meanings can cause 

confusion and can alienate generic drug companies, who sometimes 

view this as hostility to their products hidden in a discussion of 

counterfeit medicines. So our committee agreed that the problem of 

trademark infringement was not within our mandate. We attempted to understand the public health problem of poor-quality 

drugs and we limited our discussions to substandard and falsified, 

or fake, medicines. 

The problem of falsified and fake medicines is undoubtedly the 

worst in the world’s poorest countries, but poses a risk for American patients as well. We are living in what the Economist magaVerDate Nov 24 2008 12:01 Aug 14, 2015 Jkt 037690 PO 00000 Frm 00088 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\MY DOCS\HEARINGS 113\113-120 CHRIS
85 

zine recently described as a golden age for bad drugs. Different 

drugs and drug ingredients are made in different parts of the 

world. Final drug formulations may be packaged and repackaged in 

different countries many times before reaching the final patient, 

and supervising these supply chains is a monumental task. The 

committee recommendations were for the U.S. FDA to share foreign inspections and work towards mutual recognition of inspections done by other stringent regulatory agencies. We reasoned 

that it is simply not good management to have, for example, Japanese, European, and U.S. inspectors repeating each other’s work 

when so many factories in places like China and India go 

uninspected. 

The key challenge is to identify gaps before product safety emergencies occur. Until recently, the inability to track a package of 

medicines from the factory to the patient was one such gap. Our 

committee had asked the Congress to authorize the FDA to establish a mandatory track-and-trace system in the United States. We 

were concerned that the FDA had received many unfunded mandates over the years, so we would also ask the Congress to allocate 

the appropriate funds to the agency to ensure the staffing and the 

technology that is needed does exist. This is consistent with the 

recommendations of the committee and the new Act, the Drug 

Quality and Security Act in November is very much in tune with 

what the committee had recommended. I would like to thank the 

Representatives here today for your work on that law. 

Track-and-trace legislation is going to help but there are still 

many gaps in the supply chain. One of them is the question of 

Internet pharmacies. The IOM committee discussed this problem at 

great length. We reviewed research that states people buy drugs 

online for different reasons. Some can be described as lifestyle libertarians who believe they should be allowed to self-prescribe, others are bargain hunters who are looking on the Internet to get 

deals, and the third category are people who are genuinely trying 

to buy drugs for making sure they can get them with convenience. 

These customers do not understand the risk of their choices and do 

not see any better options. 

So the committee recommended that the National Association of 

the Boards of Pharmacy has a program called the Verified Internet 

Pharmacy Practice Sites, or VIPPS. That program should be 

strengthened and encouraged. That was one of the strong recommendations from the committee. 

One of the key things the committee recommended was to 

strengthen the wholesale market in the United States. We felt that 

there are three kinds of wholesalers. There are primary wholesalers, secondary wholesalers and wholesalers who are regional 

drug wholesalers, and it is easy for wholesalers to obtain licenses 

in one State and engage in commerce without federal or other 

States knowing about that. 

Mr. MURPHY. I will need you to summarize because you have 

gone a minute over. 

Mr. YADAV. So the committee recommended that FDA should 

work with State licensing boards and establish a public database 

to share information on wholesale licenses. This will prevent criminals from licensing in multiple States. On behalf of my colleagues 

86 

of the committee, I would like to once again thank the Representatives for including this provision in the DQSA law. We also believe 

that strengthening the drug wholesale supply chain will set a good 

example for other countries in the world. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Yadav follows:] 

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. 

Mr. Clark, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

TESTIMONY OF JOHN P. CLARK 

Mr. CLARK. Chairman Murphy, Ranking Member DeGette, members of the subcommittee, it is a pleasure to appear before you 

today to discuss an issue of great importance, the threat that counterfeit medicines pose to the health and safety of patients in the 

United States and around the world. 

My name is John Clark, and I am the Chief Security Officer for 

Pfizer, Inc., and Vice President of its Global Security Team. Pfizer 

is a diversified global health care company and one of the world’s 

largest biopharmaceutical companies. Our core business is the discovery, development and marketing of innovative pharmaceuticals 

for human health, and we are committed to ensuring the integrity 

of those products when they reach the market. 

I am responsible for ensuring that programs are in place to protect Pfizer’s personnel, real and intellectual property, reputation 

and, most importantly, the integrity of its medicines. Prior to joining Pfizer in 2008, I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responsible for the overall management and coordination of the agency’s operations. During my 

more than 25 years at ICE and its predecessor agency, U.S. Customs, I held a variety of investigative, management and executive 

positions. 

A significant aspect of my job at Pfizer is to mitigate the threat 

that counterfeit medicines pose to the health and safety of patients 

who rely upon Pfizer medicines to live healthier and happier lives. 

Counterfeit medicines pose that threat because of the conditions 

under which they are manufactured in unlicensed and unregulated 

sites, frequently under unsanitary conditions, and the lack of regulation of their contents. In many instances, they contain none of 

the active pharmaceutical ingredient found in the authentic medicine, or an incorrect dosage, depriving the patient of the therapeutic benefit of the medicines prescribed by their physicians. In 

others, they may contain toxic ingredients such as heavy metals, 

arsenic, pesticides, rat poison, brick dust, floor wax, leaded highway paint, and even sheetrock or wallboard, all of which we found 

in counterfeits. 

Counterfeit medicines are a global problem, one from which no 

region, country, therapeutic area or pharma company is immune. 

While the true scope of the counterfeit problem is hard to estimate, we can provide some metrics based on the seizures reported 

to us by enforcement authorities and confirmed by our labs. In reviewing those internal metrics to prepare for today’s hearing, I was 

struck by how significantly the landscape had changed since November 2011 when I appeared before the House Judiciary Committee just about 2 years ago now. 

Since November 2011, authorities have reported to us the seizure 

of more than 55 million doses of suspicious Pfizer medicines. Twenty-eight percent of those seizures—15.5 million dosages—were confirmed as counterfeit medicines, and we differentiate—we are very, 

very conservative in our statistics, and if we haven’t confirmed, it 

98 

is just reported, we don’t count it as a statistic. So we are usually 

underreporting so we don’t get accused of exaggerating. 

The number of Pfizer medicines targeted by counterfeiters has 

increased by 36 percent, from 50 to 68 different Pfizer medicines 

now. Counterfeit Pfizer medicines have been confirmed in six new 

countries—Armenia, Cameroon, Jamaica, Kosovo, Maldives, and 

Saint Lucia—bringing the total to 107 countries in which counterfeit Pfizer medicines have been seized by authorities. Counterfeit 

versions of 26 Pfizer medicines have been confirmed in the legitimate supply chains of 60 countries, an increase from 22 medicines 

in 53 countries in November of 2011. 

Seizures recorded during 2013 reveal that while Viagra, a treatment for erectile dysfunction, remains our most targeted medicine 

for counterfeiters, other medicines have attracted increasing attention with seizures of each of the top five exceeding 1 million doses. 

The seizure of almost 3.6 million counterfeit doses of Viagra represented just 34 percent of the overall confirmed seizures of Pfizer 

medicines in 2013, down from 89 percent in 2012. 

For the first time, Lipitor, a treatment for cholesterol, came a 

close second, with the seizure of almost 3.1 million tablets, representing 29 percent of all confirmed dosages seized. 

Closing out the top 5 most counterfeited Pfizer medicines last 

year were Xanax, 1.3 million, Ponstan, 1.1 million, and Centrum, 

just over 1 million, and again, these are relatively low probably 

compared to what was out there but just the ones we could confirm. 

The increased counterfeiting of Xanax is likely linked to its popularity, particularly on college campuses, as a party drug often used 

to decrease anxiety and insomnia. Additionally, Xanax appears to 

be preferred by individuals taking crystal meth. Counterfeit Xanax 

seizures in 2013 included those seized from a factory in Texas 

where 1,000 counterfeit Xanax tablets and tooling were seized by 

the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

Despite increased breaches in the legitimate supply chain, the 

major threat to U.S. patients is the Internet and the many professional-looking Web sites that promise safe, FDA-approved branded 

medicines from countries such as Canada and the U.K. In 2006, 

Pfizer Global Security launched a robust Internet program to identify and disrupt rogue online pharmacies dispensing Pfizer medicines to unsuspecting patients. Although that program resulted in 

a takedown of several rogue OLPs and arrests, it was in essence 

a whack-a-mole approach. Recognizing the limitations of that strategy, we sought a broader and more permanent remedy. 

Along these lines, in 2013 we partnered with Microsoft in an innovative OLP disruption program that attacked the affiliate networks where they were most vulnerable by simultaneously disabling domains to disrupt traffic to the sites and eliminating their 

ability to process credit card payments for orders placed. This new 

approach has proven much more effective, evidenced by the disruption of two affiliate networks and the removal of more than 3,300 

rogue OLPs from the Internet just last year. 

To protect unsuspecting patients from the risk of obtaining counterfeit medicines online, we have extended our Internet monitoring 

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vertising Web sites and social media outlets. As a result of those 

efforts, we have identified several individuals offering Viagra on 

Craigslist. Our test purchases confirmed that these individuals are 

selling counterfeits. Subsequent referral of these incidents to local 

law enforcement resulted in the arrest of several sellers including 

a Maryland housewife. The social-network monitoring also identified several drop shippers of rogue OLPs who use their access of 

counterfeit medicines to advertise independently in Craigslist. One 

such referral to police in Toronto resulted in the arrest of six 

Craigslist sellers. 

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. Clark, I have to ask you to wind up. 

Mr. CLARK. That is it. I will be glad to take questions. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Clark follows:] 

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you. I have to step out for a while, and Dr. 

Burgess will take over, but I just want to ask one clarifying question, Mr. Clark, before I go. If you compare money counterfeiting 

to electronic counterfeiting to drug counterfeiting, tell me about the 

different ratios and profitability. 

Mr. CLARK. We had 3 years ago seen German customs refer to 

a study from the University of Bonn that did just that. For a 

$1,000 base investment by a counterfeiter, they compared what 

they estimated would be the return on investment. They went 

through several levels of different commodities. I think cash was 

the lowest. For $1,000 invested, they estimated that there would be 

a $5,000 return on investment for counterfeiting cash. I think credit cards were second with $10,000 return. The second highest level 

commodity counterfeited for return on investment was electronics. 

They estimated for $1,000 investment, the return would be 

$100,000. The highest on that list by the University of Bonn was 

pharmaceutical products. For $1,000 invested, they estimated that 

the return on investment would be $500,000. 

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, incredible. I appreciate that. 

Mr. Moreau, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

TESTIMONY OF JEAN-LUC MOREAU 

Mr. MOREAU. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, 

my name is Jean-Luc Moreau and I am the global head of product 

security at Novartis International. My primary responsibility is to 

protect the company, its products, and most importantly, the people 

who rely on Novartis medicines from counterfeits. 

Modern counterfeiting is an industrial global business which in 

2010 generated an estimated $75 billion for organized crime. In 

2002, the Pharmaceutical Security Institute recorded 196 product 

incidents worldwide. In 2012, the same Pharmaceutical Security 

Institute recorded 2,018 cases representing a 10-fold increase in 

only one decade. 

Counterfeit drugs are most of the time extremely dangerous. For 

example, the World Trade Organization has estimated that counterfeit antimalarial drugs kill 100,000 Africans annually. My own 

experience tells me that this number is basically underestimated. 

Counterfeit drugs are generally indistinguishable from the genuine drugs. Some examples are displayed on the monitors. Russian 

counterfeiters have gone so far as to add holograms to the packaging of their fake drugs which say ‘‘protected against counterfeit.’’ 

Counterfeit drugs are made in clandestine facilities which are 

downright filthy. As the pictures on the monitor show, Novartis 

products are made in state-of-the-art facilities. By contrast, as the 

pictures on the screen demonstrate, counterfeiters manufacture 

their illicit products in decrepit conditions. Counterfeiting operations generally ship and/or store their fake products in unsanitary 

and improper conditions, more examples on the screen. 

Counterfeiting today is frequently highly organized, 

transnational, and businesslike. Counterfeiters operate industrial 

production facilities with the capacity to saturate markets with 

fake products. They target low-volume, high-specialty medicines, as 

well as high-volume, low-margin products as over-the-counter 

drugs or generics. They reach people directly through the Internet 

109 

or illicit retailers or they infiltrate legitimate supply chains, as in 

many countries. 

The scope of sophistication of this modern counterfeiting is clearly illustrated by the two following examples. The first example, in 

May 2006, customs officers at London Heathrow seized a shipment 

from Dubai en route to the Bahamas which contained thousands of 

packs of eight confirmed counterfeit drugs from seven pharmaceutical companies, including more than 3,000 packs of a counterfeit Novartis medicine for hypertension. The counterfeit product 

had been manufactured in China, transported by road to Hong 

Kong, flown to Dubai while they were stored in a duty-free warehouse before being shipped to the Bahamas via the U.K. In the Bahamas, an illicit fulfillment center established by Rx North, an 

Internet drug Web site, process orders placed on the Internet by 

American and Canadian patients. The fake products were shipped 

directly to the Bahamas to customers in the U.S. and Canada. 

The second example, Novartis manufactures Coartem, which is a 

breakthrough drug for malaria. Novartis has made over 500 million 

Coartem treatments available without profit in malaria-endemic 

countries through programs such as the U.S. President’s Malaria 

Initiative and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and 

Malaria. 

In March 2010, I organized a market survey in three Nigeria 

basin countries, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Benin, which concluded 

that around 25 percent of our Coartem donated to Eastern African 

countries was being stolen and shipped 5,000 miles away to Western Africa where it was sold on the street not for free but for an 

average of $5 per treatment. 

This large-scale diversion scheme created a mass-market for 

Coartem which attracted an extensive counterfeiting operation. In 

July 2012, a container ship from Guangzhou, China, to Luanda in 

Angola was seized by customs officers. It contained Hi-fi speakers 

hiding 1.5 million treatments of fake Coartem. Subsequent investigations in Western Africa confirmed that this counterfeit version 

of Coartem contained nothing but flour, cornstarch, dextrose, and 

an industrial colorant. There is no question in my mind that the 

Coartem diversion and counterfeiting schemes are grievously undercut efforts to eradicate malaria and have led directly to the 

deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans. 

The United States and other countries should develop comprehensibility of criminal laws to confront counterfeiting, impose 

stiffer sanctions for pharmaceutical crimes, and make the commitment to vigorously enforce those laws. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Moreau follows:] 

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Mr. BURGESS [presiding]. Mr. Longbottom, you are recognized for 

5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF BRUCE LONGBOTTOM 

Mr. LONGBOTTOM. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Madam Ranking Chairman, and members of the subcommittee. My name is 

Bruce Longbottom. I am assistant general counsel for trademarks 

at Eli Lilly and Company. We are a global pharmaceutical manufacturing company based in Indianapolis. And like my colleagues 

here, our company also invests heavily to research, develop, and 

produce safe and effective medicines which treat many diseases 

and save lives. 

First, let me thank the chairman, ranking member, and members 

of the subcommittee for your focus on this important issue and for 

inviting Eli Lilly to testify today about fighting counterfeit drugs 

and illegal supply chains. We do appreciate the attention you are 

devoting to investigate the problem of counterfeit medicines, which 

pose an ongoing risk to patient safety. And this threat of counterfeit medicines is an issue that is near and dear to Lilly and to also 

the heart of our CEO Dr. John Lechleiter, who has spoken on this 

on several occasions. 

At Lilly, like the other companies here, we have seen counterfeit 

copies of our own branded medicines around the world and we have 

seen counterfeiters target a range of medicines from our medicines 

for mental illness to our medicines for cancer as well. Some of the 

medicines that are fake may contain over amounts and excess 

amounts of the API, the active pharmaceutical ingredients, or perhaps contain the wrong APIs or none at all. Some counterfeit drugs 

contain toxic dangerous ingredients, and we are not alone in this 

experience, again, as heard already today. We view this as a global 

health threat that we must work diligently to solve with others in 

partnership. 

We would like to congratulate this committee for its hard work 

in passing the Drug Quality Security Act of 2013, or DQSA. That 

new law’s establishment of a track-and-trace system for pharmaceuticals will serve greatly to close gaps in the supply chain for 

prescription drugs in the traditional supply chain, which is from 

the legitimate manufacturer to the wholesaler to the pharmacies 

and then to patients. 

But while DQSA establishes important requirements for good 

guys, I believe today’s hearing is to look at the bad guys. And as 

such, I will focus my remarks today on the most common way that 

counterfeit drugs reach U.S. patient, and that is of course through 

the Internet, a topic already mentioned several times today and 

rightfully so I would add. 

Obviously, more and more of us are becoming more comfortable 

with purchasing products online. We are very easily doing that, 

and e-commerce is projected to grow at over 10 percent every year. 

And as more and more Americans do look online for their medicines, and there have been some examples even in this hearing this 

morning of looking online for medicines, what are we finding? 

Forty to fifty thousand active illegal online drug sellers, and 97 

percent, according to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy do not meet pharmacy and drug safety standards. So tens of 

124 

thousands of fake online pharmacies put patients at risk. Now, is 

that OK? Of course not. I think no one here is satisfied with that. 

We don’t want to stay at that position. 

When we interact with a pharmacy, what should we be expecting 

as we go to a pharmacy whether in the real world or online? I 

think there are two basic things. One is a drug approved by the 

FDA and the second is a pharmacist who has been licensed by their 

state pharmacy board. So that prescription medicine has been 

blessed by the FDA and that pharmacist has been blessed by the 

state licensing authority. And I would like to coin the term if I 

could the sanctity of the pharmacy. I think that is the standard 

that we should work towards whether in the real world or online. 

With regard to the online world, there is no one easy bullet to 

take care of the problem. There is no one easy solution. There are 

several elements that are critical to adding towards that solution 

and there are more details in my submitted written materials, but 

just at the very high level, some of those themes are patient education, stronger laws, more aggressive enforcement of existing 

laws, and also voluntary cooperation by Internet-based companies. 

Now, just as the DQSA used one tool primarily to tighten defenses in the brick-and-mortar supply chain, and that tool was of 

course serialization, I believe there are one or more tools that could 

also be used to tighten the illegitimate supply chain, the online 

supply chain. And one of those tools I would like to mention is 

delisting. That is a tool that could be used to exclude these bad illegal rogue online pharmacies from natural search results found 

using search engines. In other words, if a Web site selling medicines did not sell only FDA-approved drugs or did not provide those 

services using a state licensed pharmacist, you would not find that 

Web site in the search results after it was delisted. The online 

pharmacy would still be on the Internet, probably hosted in a foreign country, but would not be found by the patient in the U.S. 

doing an Internet search. 

If natural search results were cleaned up in this way, that would 

be the Internet equivalent, I believe, of what the DQSA has done 

to tighten the traditional supply chain. 

And there are other tools that could be discussed as well. Search 

optimization for the NABP-approved pharmacies may be another 

helpful tool to boost those in the search rankings. 

The Internet is here to stay. The number of fake online pharmacies is growing, and Eli Lilly and Company stands committed to 

patient safety in both the brick-and-mortar pharmacies and the 

Internet-based pharmacies, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today and I am happy to answer any 

questions. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Longbottom follows:] 

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Mr. BURGESS. Ms. Jungman, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF ELIZABETH JUNGMAN 

Ms. JUNGMAN. Thank you. Chairman Murphy, Ranking Member 

DeGette, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to present testimony. My name is Elizabeth Jungman. I 

direct drug safety and innovation work at The Pew Charitable 

Trusts. 

Mr. BURGESS. May I ask, is your mike on? 

Ms. JUNGMAN. Pardon me. My name is Elizabeth Jungman. I direct drug safety and innovation work at The Pew Charitable Trust, 

which is an independent, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to serving the public. 

Counterfeit drugs are far more than an intellectual property 

problem; they are a public health problem with real human costs. 

Counterfeit and other unsafe drugs have entered our drug supply 

numerous times over the past few decades. Three recent incidents 

of fake cancer drugs are one example. My testimony for the record 

and our Web site have others. 

I am grateful to Congress for recently enacted two import laws 

that have been discussed by other panelists, Title VII of the FDA 

Safety and Innovation Act, which focused on upstream supply 

chain security; and Title II of the Drug Quality and Security Act, 

which laid the groundwork for tightening the downstream drug distribution system. 

My testimony today will focus on next steps, how policymakers 

and stakeholders can make full use of these new tools. 

Meaningful penalties for drug counterfeiting and diversion are 

important, but the best way to prevent unsafe products from reaching patients is a tightly closed distribution system. So that is my 

focus today.By passing the Drug Quality and Security Act last 

year, Congress created a national serialization and traceability system that will fundamentally change drug distribution in this country. 

Beginning in late 2017, each package of prescription drugs will 

bear a unique serial number enabling it to be verified and eventually allowing for its distribution history to be traced. The DQSA 

contains some requirements for companies in the supply chain to 

check serial numbers but in most cases only when there is an existing belief that the product is suspect. 

A more powerful use of serial numbers would be as a routine 

proactive check. Counterfeiters can be sophisticated but falsifying 

a serial number is much harder if that number is routinely checked 

against a manufacturer’s database. Pharmacists, physicians, payers, and border agents could use this important new tool to help 

stop fake products from reaching patients. 

It is important to underscore that the risks go beyond counterfeit 

drugs. In 2009, thieves stole a tractor-trailer containing at least 

120,000 vials of insulin, an injectable drug that must be refrigerated. After several months, the stolen drugs were sold to chain 

drugstores. We don’t know how many patients received compromised medicines, but only a small percent of the drugs were 

138 

ever recovered. Regular checking could have identified them immediately. 

Verification should become routine in pharmacies. To achieve 

that, the system must be designed to ensure that verification is 

practical and efficient. Waivers of the DQSA’s requirements should 

be rare lest we exempt businesses like the pharmacist in Chicago 

indicted last year for substituting Chinese counterfeits for legitimate products. 

Patients can also make use of this new tool. Doctors who purchased a counterfeit cancer drug last year may not have known 

that it was fake. While the DQSA does not require physicians to 

check serials, patients deserve this safety check. Physician societies 

and payers should consider the potential for authentication to protect patients. 

Proactive verification of serial numbers is not without precedent. 

Other countries like Turkey and Italy already use it to protect their 

citizens and to prevent fraud. The U.S. is behind the curve in this 

case, but our law creates the tools necessary for similarly robust 

protections if Congress, regulators, and payers take action to encourage them. 

Payers can also explore the use of serial numbers as a condition 

of reimbursement both to ensure product legitimacy and to reduce 

fraud. Large-scale fraud against government programs is well-documented yet preventable through serial checks. To be fully effective, 

such an approach would require another system element not explicitly contemplated by the DQSA: decommissioning serial numbers so 

that they cannot be reused. 

Serial numbers could also be used by agents at the border. Spotchecks of incoming products could help determine legitimacy, and 

this will complement the progress in regulating drug imports that 

was made in the 2012 FDA Safety and Innovation Act. 

The DQSA requires in 10 years an electric interoperable system 

for tracing each unit of medicine. There is an opportunity now to 

build in strong features that will allow for more comprehensive 

automated use in the future. But stakeholders do not have to wait 

10 years to begin using the DQSA. Starting next year, FDA will 

stand up a public database of licensed wholesalers, and all stakeholders will pass pedigree information. So long before the law is 

fully implemented, dispensers can check to ensure that their 

sources are legitimate. 

The DQSA and the FDA Safety and Innovation Act are important steps in securing our pharmaceutical supply chain, but alone 

they will not solve the problem. Congress, regulators, border 

agents, and supply chain stakeholders can help create a safer drug 

supply by supporting robust and implementation of these laws and 

full use of the tools that they provide. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Jungman follows:] 

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Mr. BURGESS. Thank you. And I thank the witnesses, each and 

every one of you, for your testimony. And we will now move to 

questions. Each Member will be recognized for 5 minutes. I will 

begin. 

Dr. Crosse and Dr. Yadav, I appreciated your testimony. You 

heard my questions to the FDA and to ICE. I mean cost is a big 

driver here and people are looking at pharmacy bills that they may 

never have seen before. I feel that right over the horizon this problem is going to crescendo in size. 

One of you referenced people who go online because they are bargain hunters or they are self-prescribing. Self-prescribing means 

they are avoiding a doctor visit to get a prescription. So basically 

cost is the driver there. Has there been any study on, say, one of 

the popular proton pump inhibitors for acid reflux disease went 

over-the-counter. Did you see a drop-off in Internet activity with 

the purchase of other brands that remained on patent and were 

therefore more expensive? Was cost reflective in the Internet activity? 

Ms. CROSSE. I am not aware of any studies that have directly addressed that. We certainly do know that activity has increased 

across time in general and the number of sites I think reflects that. 

Internet purchases originally were focused more in the so-called 

lifestyle drugs. That has moved increasingly into individuals seeking to save money on their blood pressure medicine or whatever 

other medications they may regularly be on. But I don’t know of 

studies that specifically looked at that change when something goes 

from prescription to over-the-counter. 

Mr. BURGESS. And, Dr. Yadav, did the Institute of Medicine do 

any of that sort of investigative work? 

Mr. YADAV. So the short answer is no. I think we looked at various studies and I think we will submit to the committee some of 

the findings which show which type of categories were being purchased more, what kinds of factors and root causes were leading to 

that. But there was no study which showed how does this change 

when the product goes from being prescription to over-the-counter. 

Mr. BURGESS. Do any of our representatives from the industry 

have any experience with that? 

Well, Mr. Clark, I just noticed on your Web site some of the 

things you have in the pipeline, the Phase III and Phase II drugs, 

I mean some pretty exciting stuff already on the horizon, PCSK9 

for lipid control. Is the development of those products in any way 

going to be impacted by the fact that the diversionary activities 

that you described are going on? Is that going to have a direct effect on your research and development side? 

Mr. CLARK. It could and it is one of the worries we have had in 

rolling out just last year some of the newer medicines. They need 

a track record to build up success and to prove to the world how 

good they are. We went out ahead of several them to start checking 

the Internet and the B2B sites to see if in terms of Eloquest, 

Xeljanz, a few others that were coming out, worried that if competed with by counterfeits and there are reports of they don’t work 

because of the counterfeit effect, it could indeed actually the reputation of the medicine themselves and stuff. Fortunately, the ones 

152 

we have been looking at so far haven’t had that much competition 

on the Internet. 

Mr. BURGESS. How about for any of you does it affect your R&D 

budget, the fact that you are obviously losing sales? 

Mr. CLARK. I can speak for my shop. We have never been held 

to task by the company for return on investment for sales. It is a 

reputational thing, which obviously has a collateral sales impact, 

but it is really a patient health and safety issue for us. 

Mr. MOREAU. The very same at Novartis. 

Mr. BURGESS. And, Mr. Moreau, your description of the antimalarial drug, I mean the United States taxpayers spent a lot of 

money in the PEPFAR program to buy the drug to prevent the disease to save the children in other countries and human tragedy because of the counterfeit drugs making it into the pipeline and the 

American taxpayers being ripped off. This is something that just 

absolutely has to be stopped and we certainly appreciate your vigilance to that and we will welcome your input back to the committee. 

Mr. MOREAU. Yes, Congressman. On a more positive note, I just 

want to inform the committee that we have been working, we are 

still working very closely with federal agents attached to USAID on 

this case, and there are reasons to believe that the criminal gang 

responsible for this counterfeiting operation will one day or another 

be arrested in China. 

Mr. BURGESS. All right. Very well. And, Mr. Longbottom, you 

heard my description of the little research project I did here on the 

committee dais where I put into a search engine a name of a cheap 

pharmaceutical project. I got a lot of results, a lot of hits. And then 

you talked about delisting and in fact are those types of activities 

actually in process where you are working with the search engines 

to try to minimize this? 

Mr. MOREAU. We are currently developing a web monitoring program, especially here in the states and with the plan to liaise directly with authorities and exchange information and intelligence. 

Mr. BURGESS. All right. Thank you. 

Mr. LONGBOTTOM. Mr. Chairman, may I answer your question? 

Mr. BURGESS. Sure. 

Mr. LONGBOTTOM. Thank you. Yes, we are not currently working 

on those tools but I do know that the Center for Safe Internet 

Pharmacies, or CSIP, referred to earlier by another committee 

member, is at work to develop proposals to work together, and 

those are the e-commerce companies, the search engines, the payment card companies, the domain name registrars. So it might 

come out of that group. But wouldn’t it have been nice if had you 

done the search, the first 35 results would have been the NABPcertified—— 

Mr. BURGESS. Yes, sir. 

Mr. LONGBOTTOM [continuing]. Online pharmacies? I think that 

is where we really want to move to. I would love to see that for 

my family members going online, constituents as well. I think that 

is where we are headed. 

Mr. BURGESS. Absolutely. My time is expired. I recognize the 

ranking member for 5 minutes. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

153 

And I want to thank all of you for coming here today and working collaboratively with us to try to resolve this very difficult and 

international problem. 

I am concerned because we recognize this issue of counterfeit 

drugs. We have been trying to work on it assiduously with the 

track-and-trace legislation, with the FDA, giving more resources 

with all of the private companies giving more resources. 

But yet, according to the testimony that I am hearing from all 

the witnesses today, the prevalence of these counterfeit drugs, particularly on the Internet, just continues to grow and to get more 

sophisticated. And so what I would like to examine in just this 

short period of time I have is what we can really do to try to bend 

this curve and to solve the situation. 

So I would like to start with you, Dr. Crosse. You testified, as 

did the others on the last panel, that the sentences are really ridiculously low for these federal offenses, and I agree with that. I think 

the sentences need to be increased, but I am trying to figure out, 

and this is what I was talking to the chairman about, is how much 

is increasing sentences really going to prevent this kind of conduct, 

especially as Mr. Moreau and Mr. Longbottom and others have testified. Some of these people are renegade gangs in foreign countries. 

And so one thing I want to ask you, did the GAO find that these 

prosecutors who were able to prosecute people under other statutes, money laundering, wiretap, et cetera, would there have been 

more prosecutions and more convictions if they had been able to 

get felony convictions and higher sentences? 

Ms. CROSSE. We did hear from prosecutors that increasing the 

penalties or clarifying what was required to be the threshold for 

criminal activity might make this a higher priority among all of the 

competing cases—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. 

Ms. CROSSE [continuing]. That they have. If they are having to 

pick something that is really difficult and that carries low penalties, it has a lower priority. 

Ms. DEGETTE. And so even though they have these other statutes 

they could charge them, this would help? 

Ms. CROSSE. Right. They indicated that it would be helpful. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. But it alone would not help? We are going to 

need to do other things, right? 

Ms. CROSSE. That is correct. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. And what would some of those other things 

be? 

Ms. CROSSE. Well, there have been a number of settlements that 

have been undertaken to get at some of the service providers to 

these Internet sites. The Google settlement was mentioned earlier. 

All that did though was remove the sponsored links at the top—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. Right. 

Ms. CROSSE [continuing]. Of the page. That doesn’t eliminate 

those. 

Ms. DEGETTE. So Internet vigilance like Mr. Longbottom and 

others have been talking about would be helpful? 

Ms. CROSSE. That can be helpful. Also the NABP is engaged—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. Yes. 

154 

Ms. CROSSE [continuing]. In getting a top-level domain name, a 

.pharmacy, where there would be controls in place on which Web 

sites could have a .pharmacy extension as opposed to a .com. That 

would require educating consumers to go to those links and not 

others. 

Ms. DEGETTE. And let’s follow up on that, educating consumers. 

Mr. Clark, I was actually talking to you yesterday about this. It 

seems to me one of the real keys is educating consumers that they 

shouldn’t be going on these Web sites. Can you describe for me 

what kinds of efforts the industry is taking to do that consumer 

education? 

Mr. CLARK. Sure. I know from our experience and my colleagues 

have done similarly, we are always working with media to try and 

highlight issues, whether it is a case or just background information, speaking at conferences. We do a lot of training of law enforcement along the same lines to educate them because I think it 

is not only just the consumers. First and foremost it is the medical 

community. I mean it is astounding how doctors and nurses aren’t 

so familiar with this and law enforcement as well. So there is a 

huge outreach by most of the companies to try and get to all of the 

constituents within those sectors and stuff to try and raise awareness because—— 

Ms. DEGETTE. And, I am sorry, are you also working with the 

various federal agencies to increase this education? 

Mr. CLARK. Absolutely. 

Ms. DEGETTE. The FDA and the—OK. 

Now, I wanted to ask you, Ms. Jungman. By the way, I am the 

co-chair of the Diabetes Caucus, so I was horrified to hear your insulin example. And what you really focused on is what more can 

we do? Does Congress need to do anything to help improve this serial number issue? Because that sounded like a very intriguing and 

relatively successful way to help to identify these counterfeit drugs. 

Ms. JUNGMAN. I think that Congress definitely could have a role 

here. I think oversight as the system is implemented both to ensure that all stakeholders are fully participating but also to be sure 

that as a system, architecture is built up. There are ways that the 

system could be built that are more robust or just barebones, and 

I think congressional oversight could play a real role in ensuring 

that it is built to have the functionality that would allow for serial 

checking in a way that is automatic and simple for people to use. 

Ms. DEGETTE. Thank you. 

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And if you can help convey 

with me to Mr. Murphy that we should continue this oversight, I 

think that would be great. 

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentlelady. 

I would be willing to go for one supplemental question if you 

were. 

Ms. DEGETTE. OK. One. 

Mr. BURGESS. Well, it just so happens I have one. Has the Ryan 

Haight Act been effective in reducing the number of Internet pharmacies selling controlled substances, Dr. Crosse? 

Ms. CROSSE. DEA tells us that it has been effective in reducing 

the number of domestically located Web sites selling controlled substances. However, they haven’t been doing a lot of looking overseas. 

155 

They have had a small sample of Web sites that they looked at and 

ordered controlled substances, and 40 percent of the Web sites 

where they placed those orders actually provided them with controlled substances. They tell us, though, that they are more likely 

to be schedule III or schedule IV, drugs like Vicodin or Xanax, 

rather than oxycodone, which is a schedule II substance. So they 

do believe it has been effective in pushing the activity offshore. 

Mr. BURGESS. I recognize the ranking member for an additional 

question. 

Ms. DEGETTE. I am fine. I just want to thank the panel. 

Mr. BURGESS. And to be bipartisan I would join in that thanks 

for all the witnesses, all the members who participated in today’s 

hearing. I remind Members they have 10 business days to submit 

questions for the record and I ask all the witnesses to agree to respond promptly to written questions. 

With that, the subcommittee shall stand adjourned. Thank you. 

[Whereupon, at 12:30 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

[Material submitted for inclusion in the record follows:] 

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[The attachment to Mr. Yadav’s response has been retained in 

committee files and can be found at: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/if/if02/20140227/101804/hhrg-113-if02-wstate-yadavp20140227-sd003.pdf. 

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