Watch: Where Do Our Generic Drugs Come From? We Dug to Find Out.
Use our tool to find where your prescription drugs were made.
Key points
- That question set off a 14-month investigation into where our medications are made, how the FDA polices drug manufacturers and what happens when inspectors report issues inside factories.
- The vast majority of prescriptions filled in the United States are for generic drugs, which are often far cheaper than brand-name alternatives.
- To better understand how the FDA regulates the generic drug industry, Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose interviewed current and former factory inspectors, tested medications in a lab and sued the federal government for critical documents.
At another, inspectors said in a report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in generic drugs.
ProPublica’s Brandon Roberts and a team of data journalists made a tool called Rx Inspector that will show you the facility that manufactured your generic prescription drugs and any inspection reports, warning letters and import bans we have from the FDA.
Additional details
- Lawyers told Goetz’s mother that it was impossible to draw a straight line from Hannah’s death to a generic manufacturer, but her mother said she wonders if her daughter would still be alive if she took a different brand of tacrolimus.
- For years, Congress, doctors and watchdog groups have questioned the quality of generic drugs made overseas.
- Inspection reports describe unsafe manufacturing conditions at generic drug factories, but the Food and Drug Administration redacts the names of the medications made in those factories.
- The agency gave some manufacturers a special pass to continue to ship drugs made in factories whose manufacturing practices were so bad they had been banned from the U.S.
- Her lungs failed in 2023, and she died at 21 years old, after years of relying on the generic drug made by two manufacturers with documented problems.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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