BOX 4-4Pharmaceutical Security Institute Crime and Arrest Data

The Pharmaceutical Security Institute, a nonprofit network of 25 major pharmaceutical companies' security departments, maintains a database on compromised medicines (PSI-Inc., 2012c). In PSI records, every report of a fake product, either from member companies or from public sources, is an incident. Incidents vary in their size and time frame (PSI-Inc., 2012a). PSI also keeps records on arrests, gathered from members, law enforcement officers, and open sources. These data indicate 1,311 arrests for pharmaceutical crime in 2011, a 14 percent increase from their 2010 records (PSI-Inc., 2012b). For 44 percent of their 2011 arrests data and 59 percent of 2010 arrests data, PSI has sufficient information to tie an arrest to an incident report in their database (PSI-Inc., 2011).

In both 2010 and 2011, about one-quarter of incidents ended in an arrest. In 2011 PSI identified an increase in arrests at the point of sale and during distribution (PSI-Inc., 2011). Figure 4-2 compares PSI data from 2011 and 2010, excluding 191 incidents for which PSI had insufficient information to confidently identify the point on the supply chain where the arrest was made.

FIGURE 4-2

Arrests by activity, 2010–2011. SOURCE: PSI-Inc., 2011.