Where Was My Generic Prescription Drug Made? - Rx Inspector - ProPublica

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Rx Inspector<br>Look Up Where Your Generic Prescription Drugs Were Made<br>The FDA won’t tell Americans where their generic drugs are made, so ProPublica did it instead. Use information on your prescription label to locate the factory and see inspection reports.

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Frequently Asked Questions<br>What Is Rx Inspector?<br>Labels on pill bottles may list the distributor or repackager of a generic drug, but they don’t always show where it was really made. Without that critical information, you can’t learn what the Food and Drug Administration discovered if and when that factory was inspected for quality and safety violations.

Now you can.

To bring more sunlight to the world of drug manufacturing, ProPublica connected the disparate databases and websites where the FDA scatters this information. We also obtained documents stemming from thousands of FDA inspections of generic drug factories since 2008. At one point, we sued the FDA in federal court for factory locations and received a partial list.

Our database will show you the facility that manufactured your prescription generic drugs and any inspection reports we have from the FDA.

The data is not perfect: It is possible the FDA’s information is not up-to-date because, for example, one company acquired another or moved its manufacturing to a different location. However, we believe this is an important first step in shedding light on a process that the agency and drugmakers have sought to keep secret from consumers.

How Does It Work?<br>You enter in the name of your generic prescription drug, as well as the company name found on your pill bottle or drug label. We then search through our database for potential matches. If there are multiple matches, you can narrow your search using the markings found on a pill or other filtering options. If you have a National Drug Code on the package, you can use that as well.

When you click on the drug, we will show you any manufacturing facilities we have been able to connect to it. Clicking on a facility will let you see information on where the facility is located, what other drugs it makes and any FDA inspection information.<br>What Is ProPublica?<br>ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. As part of our “Rx Roulette” series, we have been investigating the FDA’s oversight of generic drugs. The nation’s health care system has come to rely on generics — which are often cheaper than their brand-name counterparts — to ensure patients have reliable access to affordable medications. Generics now make up about 90% of the prescription drugs dispensed in the U.S.

We’ve found that the agency quietly allowed some substandard foreign factories to continue shipping medication to the United States after flagging violations so severe that the facilities were officially banned from the U.S. market. When the FDA let drugs from those factories in, the agency did not regularly test them to ensure they would not put patients at risk.

When ProPublica hired a lab to test samples of an important generic for organ transplant patients, we found quality concerns that could compromise their effectiveness. We also found that the FDA preemptively blocks out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets and confidential information.<br>Which Drugs Are Included?<br>Our ongoing reporting has focused on the safety of generic drugs, which represent the vast majority of all prescriptions filled in the United States. Thus, the tool does not include brand-name or over-the-counter drugs. Further, we excluded gases (like oxygen tanks) and intradermal route drugs (many of these were allergy tests for things like feline hair). We included biological drug products, such as insulin. We opted to include authorized generics, which are brand-name drugs that are marketed without the brand-name label, because we thought consumers may not know their “generic” is actually a brand-name drug.<br>What Do the...