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.

China, a major link in the world's pharmaceutical supply chain, is taking steps and forming international partnerships to improve drug safety and combat drug counterfeiting.

Knowing where all our ingredients come from is the first step toward improving drug quality.

In case you missed it, AEI health expert Scott Gottlieb, MD explains the transformation of the pharmaceutical industry in a recently published piece (full text below). Drug discovery has become targeted, averse to bureaucracy, and focused on solving more difficult to cure, serious maladies.

Two decades ago, European firms dominated the world pharmaceutical market, just as they had for most of the twentieth century. Now, with a few notable exceptions, the market is dominated by American firms. U.S.-based companies account for most of the worldwide bestselling drugs and for most newly introduced breakthrough drugs--especially...

This paper uses aggregate data for the major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. to study the rate of growth in pharmaceutical R&D intensity over the period from 1952 to 2001.

Reviewing "The Myth of The Paperless Office" for the New Yorker in 2002, Malcolm Gladwell argued that if the computer had come first, and paper didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it.  Paper, it turns out, is a lot more useful than we typically appreciate.