RFID coming to Viagra, says Pfizer

Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, is using technology to fight back against drugs counterfeiters.

The company began on 15 December to affix RFID tags to all US shipments of Viagra in an effort to detect counterfeit pills, five million of which were seized by authorities last year.

The move, which Pfizer claims is a first, was expected. The company made its plans public more than a year ago but discussed new details on Friday. Among the new details is news that the company has equipped all bottles of Viagra with RFID tags, along with cases and pallets used for shipment. The company expects to tag all Viagra shipments within the US this year, totalling several million bottles, according to Peggy Staver, director of trade product integrity at Pfizer.

The company said in a statement: "Viagra was selected for the RFID project because it has been a major target for counterfeiters."

Pfizer plans to spend about $5m on the project and has tapped two tag companies. Tagsys, a French company, is supplying RFID tags for bottles, while US-based Alien Technology is furnishing tags for cases and pallets.

Pharmacists and drug distributors can retrieve the product codes stored in the tags with a special reader and verify their authenticity by checking a Pfizer database via the web.

According to Staver, RFID tags offer several advantages over barcodes, such as being harder and more expensive to duplicate. Reading them is also easier, because many tags can be scanned simultaneously without much handling.

But there are drawbacks. The young technology is prone to failure. It's also expensive. To read the tags, distributors and pharmacies need RFID readers, which cost a few hundred dollars each. Few distributors have purchased them and Pfizer does not plan to pick up the tab, Staver said.

The company hopes more of its partners will purchase the readers based on recommendations from the US Food and Drug Administration, which is urging the drug industry to adopt the technology.

Staver said: "We're hopeful that by doing this... it encourages others to look further at the technology."

Patient safety is another reason to do it, she added. Counterfeit drugs, often manufactured abroad and smuggled into the country, can contain dangerous substances.

But for Pfizer, there's clearly also a financial incentive. The company loses tens of millions of dollars to the counterfeit drug trade each year, according to a company spokesman. And highly profitable Viagra is Pfizer's most frequently counterfeited product.

Pfizer said its RFID plans do not call for tracking patient information of any kind. It also doesn't store any product or patient information on the RFID tags, just the serial number. In addition, the bottles that most patients take home from the pharmacy won't contain RFID tags because most pharmacists usually transfer medicines from manufacturers' bottles to generic amber bottles when dispensing the pills.

On all bottles containing RFID tags, the company also puts a special logo and the words, "This package contains a radio frequency device", in fine print, since you can't see the tags, which are paper-thin and inserted under the bottles' labels.

Yet the company has allowed itself some wiggle room on this front, declaring on its website: "We will communicate promptly any changes to... our use of RFID technology as it affects consumer privacy."

Staver did not elaborate on what those changes might be.

Alorie Gilbert writes for CNET News.com