The Food and Drug Administration and several major drug makers are expected to announce an agreement today to put tiny radio antennas on the labels of millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting and fraud.
Among the medicines that will soon be tagged are Viagra, one of the most counterfeited drugs in the world, and OxyContin, a narcotic that has become one of the most abused medicines in the United States. The tagged bottles -- for now, only the large ones from which druggists get the pills to fill prescriptions -- will start going to distributors this week, officials said.
But the technology is not expected to stop there. The adoption by the drug industry, officials said, could be the leading edge of a change that will rid grocery stores of checkout lines, find lost luggage in airports, streamline warehousing and add a new weapon in the battle against cargo theft.
"It's basically a bar code that barks," said Robin Koh, director of applications research at the Auto-ID Labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This technology is opening a whole series of opportunities to make supply chains more efficient and more secure."
Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have already mandated that their top 100 suppliers put the antennas on delivery pallets beginning next January. In June, Accenture, a technology consulting firm, won a contract worth as much as $10 billion from the Department of Homeland Security to use radio tags at United States border checkpoints. Other companies are rushing into the market for scanners, computer chips and other elements of the technology.
When I'm at the Viagra stage of my life, I'll be happy to know that by having my purchase "barked" aloud to the whole store, I'll be making a small but significant contribution to winning the War on Terror.
Soon you won't have to snoop in your friend's medicine cabinet to see what he's taking. You'll be able to call up his medicines remotely with your cell phone or blackberry.
