Very interesting: the FDA and several major pharmaceutical companies announced plans to implant RFID "ID chips" in bottles of prescription medicine, ostensibly to prevent counterfeiting. Currently, the first medications targeted to include the radio tags are pharmacy-size large bottles of Viagra® and Oxycontin®, but as the cost-per-unit decreases, even consumer packaging may soon contain the ID tags - leading to concerns about privacy. From the Chicago Tribune:

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 might 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Labs. "This technology is opening a whole series of opportunities to make supply chains more efficient and more secure."

Wal-Mart and the Defense Department have mandated that their top 100 suppliers put the devices on delivery pallets beginning in 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 U.S. border checkpoints. Other companies are rushing into the market for scanners, computer chips and other elements of the technology.

The labels are called radio-frequency identification. As with automated highway toll systems, the devices consist of computer chips embedded into stickers that emit numbers when prompted by a nearby radio signal. In a supermarket, they might enable a scanner to read every item in a shopping cart at once and spit out a bill in seconds, though that technology remains a distant goal.

For drugmakers, radio labels hold the promise of cleaning up the wholesale distribution system, where most counterfeit drugs enter the supply chain, often through unscrupulous employees at small wholesale companies that have proliferated in some states.

The initial expense of the system will be considerable. Each label costs 20 to 50 cents; the readers and scanners cost thousands of dollars. But because the medicines tend to be very expensive and the need to ensure their authenticity is great, officials said, the expense of the radio tags is justified.

Privacy rights advocates have expressed reservations about the devices, worrying that employers and others will be able to learn what medications people are carrying in their pockets. Civil liberties groups have voiced similar concerns about ubiquitous use of the technology in the marketplace. [read full article, reg. req.]

Is is just me, or does it seem there's no aspect of our lives that the corporate sector and our government aren't clamoring to keep tabs on?

One obvious way of circumventing the "is that Viagra® in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" problem would be to transfer the medication after purchase into a non-tagged bottle, and to discard the empty "bugged" container in the pharmacy's trashcan. However, I seem to recall that many prescription medications are unlawful to possess outside of their original pharmacy packaging [including many classified in the U.S. as Schedule II and III controlled substances] - as it's then difficult to prove the drugs are legitimately prescribed - and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a new Federal law eventually appears, making possession of "tagged"-class drugs outside of radio-labeled containers a crime.

UPDATE: Thank you, RFID Buzz - an interesting and informative weblog that discusses ID-chipping - for the link to this post!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks to RFID News for linking this post as well!

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