Recently I listened to an eye-opening podcast with Katherine Eban, who recently published a book, Bottle of Lies, on her 10 years of investigating generic drugs. This interview is well worth the listen, and I’d highly recommend it, but the short of it is that nearly 80% of the Indian and Chinese manufacturing plants that make most of the generic drugs on the market are tainted with fraud.

One of the bright spots/actionable followups on this was that there is actually a startup pharmacy, Valisure, which tests every single batch of medication that they sell (they developed their own mass-spec pipeline to do this efficiently/in a cost-effective manner).

Here’s a fascinating discussion with the CEO of Valisure on their discovery of super-high levels of the carcinogen NDMA in Zantac (Ranitidine) that’s also well worth a listen (if you are taking Zantac, including the branded versions, stop – it’s very likely that it’s an inherently unstable/carcinogenic drug!)