How to Verify Genuine Medicines

Spurious and substandard drugs remain a persistent public health issue in India, and the products involved don't always announce themselves with obviously bad packaging. Well-resourced counterfeit operations replicate strip design, foil texture, and even batch-number formatting closely enough that a pharmacist glancing at a shelf has no reliable way to tell the difference.

What patients and pharmacists currently check

• Packaging and print quality: increasingly unreliable as counterfeit printing improves.
• Batch number and expiry presence: confirms the strip has a batch number, not that the number is genuine.
• Purchasing from a trusted pharmacy: reduces but doesn't eliminate risk, since even legitimate pharmacies can unknowingly receive counterfeit stock from a compromised distribution point.

Where QR-based verification changes the picture

Where manufacturers have added cryptographic authentication to their packaging, patients and pharmacists can scan the strip with a smartphone camera and get an immediate genuine or suspicious result — no need to send anything to a lab, and no reliance on visual judgment.

What to do if a scan flags a product as suspicious

• Don't consume the medicine — return it to the point of purchase.
• Report it to the pharmacy and, where relevant, to the state drug control authority.
• If the brand offers a reporting channel through its verification app, use it — this is the data that helps manufacturers trace where a counterfeit entered the supply chain.

Why this matters beyond any single brand

Every scan-verified medicine strengthens trust in the entire pharmacy supply chain, not just one manufacturer's product — which is part of why authentication adoption tends to accelerate quickly once a few major brands in a category implement it.