The Last Run: A Counterfeit Story

The Walkers would acquire outdated medicines and re-label them with new expiration dates; take lower doses and relabel them as higher, more expensive doses; and make what appeared to be medicine from whatever they had available.

The Walkers were just two of a large, organized, international, and growing group of counterfeiters. We need to be careful and make it more difficult for the bad people to do what they do. We also need to do a better job of educating people. Law enforcement needs to know what to look for, and healthcare professionals need to consider when a drug doesn’t work, it may be fake. We, as consumers, need to know this can happen and to check if we notice something different about our prescriptions. A package with a little darker color or a slightly different print should be considered suspicious. A pill with a different taste or a new shape could mean nothing or it could mean you were given a fake. Now I check everything before leaving the pharmacy.