Counterfeit medicine fraud: man jailed

I must confess this BBC News report caused me a double-take. "A man has been jailed for eight years for his part in what has been described as the most serious fake medicine fraud in the European Union. Peter Gillespie, 64, from Hertfordshire, was part of a £4.7m plot to bring two million doses of counterfeit drugs from China to the UK. He was convicted of conspiring to defraud pharmaceutical wholesalers, pharmacists and members of the public." The fake drugs "contained only a fraction of the correct dosage. They included Zyprexa, a medicine to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder."

The prosecution claimed that patients had been put at risk by this fraud. - I seriously wonder about this. - Zyprexa is such a dangerous drug. See Drug information about Zyprexa. And, perhaps more pertinently, read this damning Bloomberg report about the criminally fraudulent claims made about Zyprexa by the drug's manufacturers and the great harm (including death) the drug caused to unfortunate patients who took it. Maybe patients would have been a great deal less at risk from counterfeit Zyprexa than from the real thing...

I believe that the only health in which drug companies are interested is the health of their own financial profits.