DrugBuyers.Com: Electronic tracking devices

No that is NOT what they are talking about at all. They are proposing packaging that could be tracked through the supply chain, not the individual tablets themselves. The focus is to ensure that the practitioner dispensing the medication to the patient has a verifiable means of assuring the contents' authenticity. It would ends at the pharmacy counter, if not before, for companies who receive and precount medications. Neither would the program conceivably be extended into patients homes, nor could it for any prescription a customer simply refused to accept in a manufacturer's package.

Except for manufacturer-packaged unit doses, prescription meds are removed from their original packaging before being counted and poured or otherwise prepared into bottles, vials, and jars. Careful inspection of virtually all manufacturer packages reveals text to the effect that "this package is not suitable for dispensing to the patient'. This is also the reason that packaged quantities of medication are rarely in the quantities they are most commonly prescribed, as to increase the likelihood that individual pharmacies will not only have to buy an additional unit to maintain in inventory, but also to discourage the practice of dispensing the manufacturer's original packaging.

There are many other reasons for this; for example, not all of the text on the bottle is intended for the patient. It is generally not considered to be in the patients' best interest to share all of the clinical pharmacology or trail study data, nor is it to be made aware of all side-effects during trial, as many patients tend to develop side-effects after simply becoming aware that they have been reported elsewhere. The final consideration is that virtually no state labeling requirement would accommodate a label over the manufacturer's as there is no way to guarantee that it would cover irrelevant data such as possible dosing guidelines, when only the prescription contains the proper dosing information for each patient.

Regardless of the fact that some pharmacies simply do dispense sealed bottles, most who do are doing so contrary to practice guidelines.

For more reasons than I either can, or care to, discuss in a single post, there is nothing "big brother-ish" about this process in terms of tying meds to patients, and the pharmacy industry sorely needs a solution which can ensure medication authenticity. Understanding all the ways an initiative like this could help to stem the tide of expired and counterfeit medications found in the U.S. retail prescription supply chain really requires some insight into how the pharmaceutical distribution process works, which is far more complex than anyone would want discussed in this thread; but a solution that resembles this would indeed go a long way toward preventing some of the most common sources for illicit or counterfeit pharmaceuticals.