Awareness of a new therapy travels faster than authorized access. Where patients know a medicine exists but cannot get it legitimately, illegal sellers can move into the gap.
When authorized supply cannot meet patient demand, counterfeiters can move fast to fill the gap with illegal product. The World Health Organization identifies limited access to affordable, quality assured medicines as a condition in which falsified products are more likely to circulate.
Source: WHO, on substandard and falsified medical products.
A real medicine is known but hard to obtain legitimately.
Buyers turn to sellers with no verified supply chain.
Wrong ingredients, wrong doses or harmful substances.
illegally traded erectile dysfunction pills were seized in the United Kingdom across five years, one of the most frequently seized categories of illegal medicine.
Source: MHRA, February 2026 (seizures across 2021 to 2025).
The brand carries the loss. The patient carries the risk. The longer the time to first patient access in secondary markets, the more room an illegal market has to fill the gap.
To be clear on the evidence: delayed access can create a gap that illegal sellers exploit. This is a condition in which counterfeit risk is more likely, not a claim that any single launch caused it.
Go deeper
When the science works it can create demand that cannot be met by current launch orchestration, opening a gap that bad actors can exploit. The Shadow Market discussion paper asks who really pays the price, and what are the solutions?
The Shadow Market, part two of our conversation series
