In a bid to battle against their product from being faked, Pfizer has decided to add to the packaging of the pill Viagra, a radio frequency identification tag to allow the verification of a real pill from a fake pill. The company is confident that the move will bring down the drugs duplicators. The tag will not be effective in the battle against the importing of Viagra into the country illegally. They had not considered that issue when deciding to make radio frequency identity tags.

The RFID’s are small chips that will be present on the underside of labels in the packages of all forms of the drug. The dispensers of the drug use scanners made for this very purpose so that the code can be communicated and verified over the Internet by a secure website of the company. Pfizer said that it was the first drug company to use the RFID technology but also noted that a smaller company, Purdue Pharma had used it to protect its drugs from counterfeitency.

Though now Pfizer Inc. can check the authenticity of the goods dispensed, they wont be able to know the places the drugs are at via the technology.  To incorporate this into the system they plan to introduce that all the distribution centres should agree to install matching technology and should agree to use it such that all the information can be shared. The company said that they will take it further and apply this technology to their other products too to stop illegal sales of drugs.

The total sales for Pfizer for the third quarter were three hundred and eighty six million dollars. More than fifty percent of this profit was achieved in USA. The drug remains the markets top choice despite its decrease in sales due to the introduction of Cialis, which has a longer effect than that of Viagra. The company had filed lawsuits against many illegal sellers on the net who operated via websites. They say they dont know of the extent of the damage that the counterfeit sales has done to their profitability.

Technology Fights Against Fake Viagra