Occupational Pharmaceutical Counterfeiting Schemes: A Crime Scripts Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article presents a crime script for pharmaceutical counterfeiting schemes perpetrated by licensed health care professionals; we term these types of schemes occupational pharmaceutical counterfeiting. To date, there have been no empirical investigations of these schemes, nor any attempts to disentangle their many elements and components. Using qualitative content analysis techniques we examined data from the A-CAPP Product Counterfeiting database related to pharmaceutical counterfeiting schemes. We develop a crime script for pharmaceutical counterfeiting that describes key acts, scenes, actors, activities, and enforcement conditions. Occupational counterfeiters leverage their position as a health care provider to abuse patient trust and conceal their deviant acts.

KEYWORDS:

• crime scripts
• occupational offending
• pharmaceutical counterfeiting

Notes

1. According to Cornish (1994) crime scripts are composed of “specific tracks … which organize knowledge … and enable the individual to deal with differences in procedures in specific circumstances.” Metascripts are a type of script, where the term “meta” is used to identify the “level of generality at which the script concept can operate.” Metascripts are more specific than universal scripts yet less specific than protoscripts, scripts, and tracks.

2. Covering both tracks in a single paper would have also nearly doubled the length of the paper.

3. MacDougall defines mercenary crime in the following way: A crime committed for pecuniary gain, where the substance of the crime rather than the form is of importance.