Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Safeguards for drug ingredients work

Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s Monday editorial, “A dangerous monopoly: China dominates the international market for key ingredients in drugs and medicines”:

Unlike what your editorial suggests, the Food and Drug Administration’s rigorous approval standards and good-manufacturing-practices requirements apply without regard to where a product is manufactured or its active pharmaceutical ingredients are sourced.

Ensuring that FDA has sufficient resources to carry out its mission is important, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has supported additional resources for the agency.

Brand-name pharmaceutical companies also take many steps to ensure the quality of active pharmaceutical ingredients used in their finished products — such as conducting their own inspections of active pharmaceutical ingredients’ suppliers and testing samples of incoming ingredients — to comply with the FDA’s strict regulatory standards, protect patient safety and help prevent adulterated active pharmaceutical ingredients from entering our drug supply.

The fact is that a majority of Americans trust what they are getting from local pharmacies’ shelves. This can be attributed, in many ways, to the Prescription Drug Marketing Act, which has helped prevent, for the most part, counterfeit medicines from entering America’s drug supply system.

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