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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

I understand the fear, but I don't think fake medicine is as big of an issue as fake market place items.

PillPack already has an established distribution network and prescription delivery licensing in 50 states. I don't know for certain, but I would assume that fake prescription medicine is a much bigger risk and would threaten the operation more than, say, fake batteries.

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It's likely they'll integrate on the ecommerce side of things, not on the supply chain side anyhow - the economy of scale that amazon has for shipping will be beneficial.

People don't want to buy legal drugs from their UPS guy.

EDIT: i'm from outside the US, and after reading all the complains about delivery people throwing packages etc, i thought people don't trust delivery guys enough for medicine.

It appears i was wrong.

What exactly do you mean here?

That you don't feel safe receiving your medicine being delivered last mile from some random UPS guy?

If this is what you mean -- I get my medicine by mail order from CVS. I cannot imagine now having to go to CVS every single month I get my medicine.

I mail order my recurring prescription medicines from the hospital pharmacy all the time. No waiting in line and they give me a substantial discount.

My partner buys legal drugs from her pharmacy. Half the friggin time, there's some supply problem on the back-end, and she can't get her drugs in time.

Anyone who could fix this problem will get her business in a heartbeat.

Ditto. I detest Walgreens because of its invasive marketing and spamming, but I use it because CVS in my area can't keep even basic meds in stock.

I'll be among the first to switch to AmazonRx.

For pills, I would expect they'll use USPS, not UPS. That's how I get my medicine. It comes in a shipping bag instead of a box or rigid envelope.

In many cases, insurance mandates that you use their contracted mail-order pharmacy when possible. In other cases, they recommend but don't require it since the fees are lower for everyone that way. This is in the USA.

Yeah, the penalties for selling fake insulin are muuuuuuuuuuuccccccchhh greater for distributors than selling a fake Gucci belt. Also the number of companies with licenses to sell regulated substances is pretty small making it really easy to validate.

Shitty generics are a big problem and the FDA doesn't really care.

I reject specific manufacturers from my CVS and get trusted manufacturers all the time.

Hard to do these days though. Teva is killing off a bunch of generics, Puerto Rico still a mess, weird shortages of common meds, etc. Sometimes I spend an entire day going around the city trying to find the specific generic which I'm used to. And then only get partial fills, etc.

It doesn't have to be fake to cause harm, at least for epilepsy. The filler in the pills can vary by manufacturer.

Yup. Insurance companies like to pretend all generics are the same, but they are not. Getting them to pay for the brand because all of a sudden your pharmacy switches generic brands is almost impossible.

Can you explain what is different about certain generics?

Generics, all of them I'd intuit, seem to be manufactured with the same active ingredients but different 'filler' ingredients that are non-active.

Abruptly changing that filler could very well send an epileptic into a static seizure.

it absolutely is a huge issue, with fines that bite. Google had to settle for +500M after serving ads for fake medicines in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the primary aim here was to get a bargaining chip for their negotiations for their health care JV (a much bigger market)

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