For more than 20 years, our country has been involved in combating crimes that damage the pharma supply chain to such an extent that it has led a project to transfer its expertise to other EU nations

By Editorial staff

Italy is at the highest levels in Europe for the effectiveness of combating pharmaceutical crime, so much so that Aifa was entrusted with the coordination of the project MEDI-THEFT with the aim of transferring the good practices that characterize our national system to other Member States. In fact, if the enforcement action is not carried out in parallel between all the countries, the risk is of obtaining limited results, which perhaps move the criminals from Italy to other member states, without however eradicating the phenomenon.

As Domenico Di Giorgio, manager of the Aifa product quality and fight against pharmaceutical crime office, explains, “closing sales channels is the best way to discourage criminals who dedicate themselves to the theft and laundering of medicines, but the mechanism can work only if all channels are closed, that is, if foreign markets can also be blocked with the same measures in use for years Italy”.

Theft and money laundering are the main crimes

In particular, the project, which concluded in October 2023 after two years of activity, aimed to increase the effectiveness of investigations, strategic analysis processes and international cooperation between public and private, thanks to a platform with a triple function: collecting and analyzing data relating to pharmaceutical crimes with a view to prevention, avoiding new access to the market for stolen medicines through the creation of timely risk indicators and improving international and public-private synergy.

Whether it is theft on commission or for the purpose of money laundering, sales on foreign markets, online or by word of mouth, the pharmaceutical supply chain offers several weak points. Support warehouses, contractors, pharmacies, means of transport: the drug distribution chain is an often very complex system, which can be sensitive to a type of crime that is dangerous for both companies and consumers.

Furthermore, as highlighted by the research The theft of medicines in the EU, conducted by the TRANSCRIME research center of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, the data collection in this regard is often incomplete and the real extent of the problem is in all likelihood underestimated.

The investigations coordinated by Aifa since 2014 for the so-called Operation Volcano have highlighted how the theft and laundering of medicines represent the main form of counterfeiting on the European market: medicines are stolen by criminals from our hospitals and from other countries, manipulated and stored in unsuitable conditions and cleaned through invoices that mask their illegal origin, generating danger for patients in all those countries where the supply chain is more permeable than the Italian one.

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