The adulteration and fraudulent manufacture of medicines is an old problem, vastly aggravated by modern manufacturing and trade. In the last decade, impotent antimicrobial drugs have compromised the treatment of many deadly diseases in poor countries. More recently, negligent production at a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy sickened hundreds of Americans. While the national drugs regulatory authority (hereafter, the regulatory authority) is responsible for the safety of a country's drug supply, no single country can entirely guarantee this today. The once common use of the term counterfeit to describe any drug that is not what it claims to be is at the heart of the argument. In a narrow, legal sense a counterfeit drug is one that infringes on a registered trademark. The lay meaning is much broader, including any drug made with intentional deceit. Some generic drug companies and civil society groups object to calling bad medicines counterfeit, seeing it as the deliberate conflation of public health and intellectual property concerns. Countering the Problem of Falsified and Substandard Drugs accepts the narrow meaning of counterfeit, and, because the nuances of trademark infringement must be dealt with by courts, case by case, the report does not discuss the problem of counterfeit medicines.

This report assesses the magnitude, flows and drivers of illicit trade and the illegal economy including: narcotics, human trafficking, wildlife, sports betting, counterfeit medicines, alcohol and tobacco.

Crime and Terrorism Risk is a collection of original essays and articles that presents a broad overview of the issues related to the assessment and management of risk in the new security age. These original articles show how researchers, experts and the public are beginning to think about crime and terrorism issues in terms of a new risk paradigm that emphasizes establishing a balance between threat and resources in developing prevention and response strategies.

This book evaluates the impact of situational crime prevention measures implemented by social media platforms to identifying, blocking, and removing content linked to illegal traded medicines. It discusses the extent of social media usage in trafficking of medicines; the ease of access; visibility of the content; language of posts; products most traded; and types of posts. Research results support the hypothesis of the limited impact of these measures, due not to a lack of effectiveness but to asymmetrical implementation. This volume will be of interest to researchers, law enforcement, policy makers, social media groups, public health practitioners.

This book details the latest research and development in the use of magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy as tools to give quantitative insights concerning late stage pharmaceutical formulation, tablet manufacturing and drug dissolution behaviour. The book combines different facets of magnetic resonance and highlights the use of spatial resolution (MRI) and how this adds to the knowledge base to further our understanding of the microscopic physicochemical processes occurring during drug release from solid dosage forms. New topics, that have not been thoroughly reviewed elsewhere, are covered including the applications of solution state magnetic resonance in process scale up, reaction monitoring/understanding and process analytical technologies (PAT); dissolution testing; and counterfeit analysis. Solid state NMR and its role in understanding phase separation in dispersions, polymorphism and crystallography are included and magnetic resonance imaging and its use in assessing tablet dissolution performance, mass transport and mixing in hot melt extrusion (HME) are covered. Focusing on late stage development rather than molecular drug discovery provides a unique approach and the book will appeal to a diversity of disciplines using spectroscopy for study. Aimed at researchers in drug development, manufacture and formulation in both industry (pharmaceutical companies) and academia (pharmacy program), it includes examples, where appropriate, of studies on commercially available pharmaceutical products.