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Drug pedigree requirements come and go, and likely will come again

Those waiting for California to implement e-pedigree requirements for drugs as a means of thwarting counterfeiters: Hold your horses.

Sometimes it seems like everybody and their brother is out there trying, but failing, to issue drug pedigree requirements. Okay, maybe that’s overstating it a bit. Maybe it’s not everybody. But Florida has started requiring drug pedigrees. And both the feds and the State of California are loudly proclaiming their intentions to attack drug counterfeiting with a pedigree requirement, though at this point we’ve seen more delays than implementation.

The feds didn’t delay intentionally, at least not in the most recent instance, which was caused by a court injunction against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And not all aspects of their regulation got halted by the injunction. But before that, it had taken them seven years to declare that their 1999 proposed rule would become effective. Remember that 1999 proposed rule? It was the one that implemented a 1992 law.

The court injunction I mentioned above hit just a few days after the December 2006 start date for FDA’s new pedigree requirement. For more on the requirements, see www.packworld.com/view-21241. The now ironic headline was “No more delays for drug pedigree requirement.”

Turning to California, that state’s pedigree requirement was to have begun at the start of this year. The federal rules only strongly suggested using e-pedigree technologies like radio-frequency identification (RFID), but the California law was poised to outright require e-pedigree. It would have required serial numbers on individual bottles, and it called for each player in the chain of commerce—manufacturer, distributors and even the pharmacist—to add information to the e-pedigree.

California delayed the start of its requirements from January 2008 until January 2009, though there’s talk of pushing it further, to 2011. The concern there is that the industry doesn’t yet have access to the necessary technology.

Whatever California does, of course, stands a good chance of becoming, in essence, national law. Packagers may be familiar with this phenomenon from their experience with California’s Proposition 65. That 1986 law calls for warnings before one exposes Californians to listed chemicals known to California to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. It leads manufacturers to either put warnings on products or reformulate to remove the listed chemical. Faced with the choice of A) making a California-only version of their product or label in addition to their regular one and doubling SKU’s and complicating distribution, or B) simply changing their product or label for sale everywhere, most manufacturers choose B. Thus, a California requirement causes a change in products sold nationwide.

Similarly, some are predicting that since California is so big and its e-pedigree requirements so burdensome—they call for individual-package serialization—it would be too expensive to serialize for California only but not the non-California markets. So, California might drive the national e-pedigree bus.

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