Chief Pharmaceutical Inspectorate

The practice of falsifying medicines and their illegal trade constitute a global problem for both highly-developed and developing countries, while the scale of the phenomenon is increasingly more widespread, which is a hazard for the safety and life of patients. The issue of falsified medicines in legal trade has not affected Poland so far – the tests of medicines collected from pharmacies, limited service pharmacies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers conducted by national laboratories have not demonstrated the presence of falsified medicines at those places so far.
 
Falsified medicinal products and illegal trade in medicines – real hazard
Falsified medicines do not meet the quality requirements specified for particular medicinal products, they usually contain ingredients of worse quality and mixed in wrong proportions, contaminations, or other unapproved active substances with unknown safety of use – substances hazardous to health and life. It happens quite often that their composition is entirely different from the one declared on the package.
A serious problem is also distribution of medicinal products at unauthorized places, where illegally marketed medicines lose their original quality due to incorrect conditions of transport and storage. These products usually include medicines subject to medical prescription, the unattended administration of which can cause a serious and real hazard to the health and life of patients.