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Drug bottles to get `bar code that barks'

By Gardiner Harris
New York Times News Service

November 15, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration and several major drugmakers are expected to announce an agreement Monday to put tiny radio antennas on the labels of millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting and fraud.

Among the medicines that soon will be tagged are Viagra, one of the most counterfeited drugs in the world, and OxyContin, a narcotic that has become one of the most abused medicines in the United States. The tagged bottles--for now, only the large ones that druggists get to fill prescriptions--will start going to distributors this week, officials said.

But the technology is not expected to stop there. The adoption by the drug industry, officials said, could be the leading edge of a change that might rid grocery stores of checkout lines, find lost luggage in airports, streamline warehousing and add a new weapon in the battle against cargo theft.

"It's basically a bar code that barks," said Robin Koh, director of applications research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Labs. "This technology is opening a whole series of opportunities to make supply chains more efficient and more secure."

Wal-Mart and the Defense Department have mandated that their top 100 suppliers put the devices on delivery pallets beginning in January. In June, Accenture, a technology consulting firm, won a contract worth as much as $10 billion from the Department of Homeland Security to use radio tags at U.S. border checkpoints. Other companies are rushing into the market for scanners, computer chips and other elements of the technology.

The labels are called radio-frequency identification. As with automated highway toll systems, the devices consist of computer chips embedded into stickers that emit numbers when prompted by a nearby radio signal. In a supermarket, they might enable a scanner to read every item in a shopping cart at once and spit out a bill in seconds, though that technology remains a distant goal.

For drugmakers, radio labels hold the promise of cleaning up the wholesale distribution system, where most counterfeit drugs enter the supply chain, often through unscrupulous employees at small wholesale companies that have proliferated in some states.

The initial expense of the system will be considerable. Each label costs 20 to 50 cents; the readers and scanners cost thousands of dollars.

But because the medicines tend to be very expensive and the need to ensure their authenticity is great, officials said, the expense of the radio tags is justified.

Privacy rights advocates have expressed reservations about the devices, worrying that employers and others will be able to learn what medications people are carrying in their pockets. Civil liberties groups have voiced similar concerns about ubiquitous use of the technology in the marketplace. But under the current agreement, the technology would not come into play at the retail level.

Counterfeit drugs are comparatively rare in the U.S., but federal officials say the problem is growing. Throughout the 1990s, the FDA typically pursued about five cases of counterfeit drugs every year. In each of the last several years, the number of cases has averaged about 20, but law-enforcement officials say that figure does not reflect the extent of the problem.

Last year more than 200,000 bottles of counterfeit Lipitor made their way onto the market. In 2001, a pharmacist in Sunnyvale, Calif., discovered that bottles of Neupogen, an expensive growth hormone prescribed for AIDS and cancer patients, were filled only with salt water.

"We've seen organized crime start to get involved," said William Hubbard, an associate FDA commissioner. With some drugs costing thousands of dollars for each vial, the potential profits are huge, he said.

Radio labels fight counterfeiting by providing a unique identifier that is almost impossible to copy. When pharmacists receive delivery, they should be check the history of each bottle over an online database.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

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