Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra, and another pharmacy standards team are gathering in order to warn customers about the risks of prescription medicines that are counterfeit. These drugs pose a major threat to the pharmaceutical giant and other legitimate drug makers. Pfizer Inc., with the impotence pill Viagra, is one of the most counterfeited drugs on the market. Last Thursday the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy said that they are going to start of an educational campaign to bring awareness about the dangers of counterfeit drugs. They say the want to help people find legitimate pharmacies that are online.

This educational campaign effort includes a website where they have video series on a new YouTube channel called "spot fake meds". They explain how counterfeiters take over websites in order to sell knock-offs of Pfizer medicines such as Viagra. The videos show how counterfeit drugs can be very dangerous because who knows what kind of toxins they are made with. Pfizer has said that they confiscated knock offs that contained lead and even rat poison. They are also worried that the drugs can have the wrong amounts of an active ingredient in them. As well, they claim that they are worried about the people who buy medicines from illegal online pharmacies because they run a high level of identify theft and financial fraud if they provide credit card numbers or other sensitive personal information.

Pfizer, based in New York, is the world's largest money making drug maker with profits running into the billions. Naturally counterfeit versions of their drugs poses a threat. So far Viagra has been sold in at least 101 countries for a fraction of the cost. Fake versions of at least 40 Pfizer products have been detected in those countries, including cholesterol fighter Lipitor, the painkiller Celebrex, Alzheimer's treatment Aricept, blood-pressure drug Norvasc, antidepressant Zoloft, and Viagra for erectile dysfunction. The estimated worldwide sales of counterfeit medicines was well over $75 billion last year which burns Pfizer's britches. According to the World Health Organization, sales of counterfeit Pfizer drugs have gone up about 90% since 2005. Meanwhile, one in six Americans bought medicines from online pharmacies last year which is not something big pharmaceutical corporations will tolerate.
When Pfizer representatives bought Viagra from the websites they found after performing an online search, all 26 websites that it tried were operating illegally and they claim that four out of five were selling fake Viagra. The national pharmacy group says that they recently reviewed more than 8,000 websites selling prescription drugs and claimed that 96 percent of them "appeared" to not be following pharmacy laws or standards for practice. At the time of this writing, it is not clear if those laws they are talking about apply to other countries.