August 30, 2024
Our response to the op-ed in The Hill
Last week, The Hill published an editorial by Dr. Kenneth McCall titled “Fake, unsafe weight-loss drugs are a worsening public health dilemma” in which he makes unfounded claims about pharmacy compounding. Here’s the response from our CEO (submitted as a letter to the editor, yet to be published or acknowledged):
In his op-ed for The Hill, Dr. Kenneth McCall is right: Fake pharmacies and the counterfeit, untested substances they sell are a public health dilemma. I’d even call them a scourge. But McCall is careless when he lumps legitimate compounded drugs in with the sketchy stuff as if they are one and the same.
I feel sure he knows that medications prepared for an individual patient in a state-licensed, state-inspected pharmacy pursuant to a prescription are required to adhere to the high standards of the U.S. Pharmacopeia, in addition to state and federal law and FDA guidance. Unfortunately, both Dr. McCall and the organization on whose board he serves, the Partnership for Safe Medicines, have relied on statements they’ve copied almost verbatim from drugmaker news releases that conflate legitimate compounding with illicit activity and are grossly misleading.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that those drugmakers in fact fund the Partnership for Safe Medicines. In any case, Dr. McCall’s piece disparages legitimate pharmacy compounding — an essential therapeutic practice in our healthcare system, and one that millions of patients depend on when an FDA-approved drug is not appropriate for their situation (in the judgment of a prescriber) or not currently accessible.
