Rx Inspector: ProPublica’s New Tool Provides Drug Info the FDA Won’t

With every bottle of prescription medication comes an implied promise: The drugs are safe and effective and meet strict standards set by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the agency known as one of the world’s toughest regulators provides only intermittent oversight of the foreign factories where generic drugs are made. And when investigators turn up mold, filthy equipment and contaminants in those facilities, the FDA keeps the names of the drugs they make secret.

Consumers often have no way of knowing if the medications they are taking came from factories that used dirty water, were infested by insects or birds, or were outright banned from shipping drugs to the U.S., but then granted special exemptions to do so anyway.

Today, ProPublica is launching Rx Inspector, a first-of-its-kind database that provides answers to what the FDA won’t tell us: where our generics are coming from and the track records of the factories that made them. The information is harder to find than you may think.

Labels on pill bottles often list a distributor or repackager rather than the actual manufacturer — and some have no information at all. When ProPublica asked our readers to send in photos of their pill bottles, they flooded our inbox with pictures proving just how difficult that information is to come by.