In his new book, “Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines,” Roger Bate explores the underground trade in illegal medicines that kills over 100,000 people per year and supplants billions of dollars of real products.

Any efforts to improve public health by developing new medicines or by changing treatment policies will ultimately be pointless if the drugs patients actually take contain insufficient or incorrect ingredients.

With 100,000 patients dying every year from dangerous medicines, it is time to take concrete actions. Establishing a treaty against fake medicines should be the first step.

From the economic point of view, the harm of substandard or counterfeit drugs depends on whether consumers can tell drug quality from direct or indirect information. If poor-quality drugs can always pretend to be of high quality, consumers are deceived and manufacturers are discouraged to produce high-quality in the long run.

Every day patients receive treatments that do not work properly. For many this means no relief from symptoms, but for some death is the result. Yet concerted action against such products is limited. Before we can discuss why that's the case, I will attempt to explain what kind of products don’t work, and what we should call them.

The counterfeiting of medicines is so prevalent yet totally unaddressed and therefore legal in international criminal law. A counterfeit medicine treaty should be drafted under the auspices of the World Health Organization.

Since there is no demand for dangerous medicine, international action has a far greater chance of success than the war against narcotics.

For at least four decades Colombia has been synonymous with the costly war against narcotics. But a different kind of drug war brought me to Bogotá - the fight against counterfeit and substandard pharmaceuticals.