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Pharma Business Pharmaceuticals: Target For Terrorism S By Dr. Miri Halperin Wernli and Dr. Boaz Ganor lowly and steadily, terrorism, like a malignant cancer, has entered our lives. What once was an occasional event on the other side of the world can no longer be ignored as someone else's problem. Terrorists, alone, in cells, or part of expanding international networks, are affecting the way we live, the way we think, and the way we do business. Government facilities, planes, trains, ships, oil refineries, and luxury locations have all taken the biggest and most publicized hits. The biopharmaceutical industry has seen it in the form of counterfeiting, adulteration, and diverted product, all of which are, perhaps, more disruptive than destructive. But that can easily change. The ingredients, technologies, knowledge, and global distribution inherent in making and delivering medicines can be turned too easily from benefit to destruction. That's why we, a senior pharmaceutical executive and the head of a counterterrorism think tank, wrote this article. It is part of an ongoing initiative to explain why the biopharmaceutical industry needs to be alert to its vulnerabilities to terroristic influence and what it can do to reduce the risk. WANING PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR BIOPHARM Fundamental to understanding the problem is an understanding of the origins and motives of those who would do harm. It's a fellowship of strange bedfellows: people from different backgrounds and with different agendas willing to deploy extreme violence to send their messages and to get their way. What they have in common is the use of violence among other tactics to impose their will. 38 LifeScienceLeader.com We also need to appreciate the cultural environment in which the drug industry exists. The negative image portrayed in popular media shapes how people think. There was a time when the industry was held in high regard by most levels of society. That has changed, and life-saving or life-enhancing benefits aside, there's little understadning within the general population of the way drugs are developed, marketed, and sold. A recent opinion survey of 600 international, national, and regional patient groups on the corporate reputation of pharma in general and 29 leading pharma companies in particular indicated that only 34 percent of respondents gave pharma a "good" or "excellent" rating. Among the areas patient groups rated pharma as having a "poor" record were 1) a lack of fair pricing policies leading to unseemly profits (50 percent); 2) a lack of transparency in all corporate activities (48 percent); 3) management of adverse event news (37 percent), and 4) acting with integrity (32 percent). For a business concerned with health, such waning popular support creates an unhealthy reality. The biopharmaceutical industry is highly vulnerable. In response, industry executives need to expand their security thinking to protect against terrorist exploitation. January 2014 BANKROLLING TERRORISM WITH COUNTERFEITS The US Drug Enforcement Agency recognizes that Hezbollah and Hamas make counterfeit drugs that are distributed and sold by established criminal networks throughout the Middle East and Latin America. This trafficking produces revenues that fund their terrorist activities. They aren't alone. Other terrorist and criminal groups trade in counterfeits. It's a low-cost, high-margin business preying on a voracious market being robbed of the therapeutic benefits of the real thing. As if the use of counterfeits to bankroll terrorism were not bad enough, think about the mass damage a zealot or other madman could cause by adding a lethal ingredient to these so-called drugs. Memory of the still-unsolved Tylenol killings in the Chicago area haunt those who recognize just how vulnerable unprotected pipelines can be. TERRORISM RECEPTOR SITES The equipment, materials, and personnel on which industry relies are potential terrorist targets. Laboratories, equipment, and other facilities that could be used to manufacture deadly pathogens are spread across the globe: the hospital in Karachi, the university chemistry lab in La Paz, the clinical research site in New Delhi.