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Drug Busters: Tracking Down Counterfeiters

Novartis deploys a global team to track down counterfeit drugs and help authorities prosecute counterfeiters.

As the problem began to escalate in the late 1990s, Christian started planting the seeds for what has blossomed into a robust anticounterfeiting squadron. Christian has a long history at the company. After serving for 20 years with the U.S. Secret Service, which included a stint as head of Latin American operations, he joined the Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company Sandoz in 1989. In 1996, Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis.

Christian, 59, is someone who gives the impression he has seen it all. He's of medium build, with light blue eyes, the raspberry cheeks of a farmer or fisherman, and gray and white hair fashionably swept back. Christian smiles frequently and is quick to laugh, especially when Jackson and Adrian Roman, executive director of corporate security for Latin America, join the conversation.

Like Christian, both Jackson and Roman are veterans of the international security scene. Jackson, 44, who hails from the United Kingdom, joined the company in 2002 after working at SGS, a large, Swiss-based multinational. Prior to that, he worked for the British government in a security and intelligence capacity. Roman, who has 34 years of investigative experience, has been with Novartis for eight years. He had worked at Texaco, and, like Christian, had spent 20 years in the Secret Service. (The corporate security staff as a whole totals 34 people20 in corporate security, six in infosecurity and eight in the company's aviation unit, which Christian heads. There are also security managers in various countries that are, Christian says, technically part of the country business unit but in reality report to corporate security.)

By the late 1990s, Christian knew Novartis needed to attack the counterfeiting problem head-on. Since the merger, his department has seized counterfeit pharmaceuticals (purporting to be made by Novartis and other companies) worth hundreds of millions of dollars, participated in the arrests of hundreds of suspects and seized tons of manufacturing equipment, printing presses and raw materials.

Among the planks of Novartis's anticounterfeiting platform:

1. Investigations and intelligence.

Novartis's investigations seek to identify perpetrators (for example, producers and distributors), disrupt their activities, and support criminal prosecutions by local and national law enforcement authorities.

By chasing down every lead, Christian and his team pursue their primary goal to remove counterfeit product from the street. But there are plenty of other reasons: to prevent losses from lost sales of legitimate product; protect the integrity of the company name, products and reputation; identify weaknesses in their systems; and to be socially responsible. "One bad pill is too many," says Christian.