ABSTRACT

There are many issues facing pharmaceutical packaging that play a role in keeping

the products safe while being responsible to the patient and the community at

large. In all the issues, packaging plays and will continue to play a significant role

in their resolution. The problems range from patient compliance, use of unit dose

packaging, anticounterfeiting measures, and broad environmental issues regard-

ing material choice and sustainability. Counterfeiting has also become a major

problem that continues to grow. In a broader context, both the environmental

issues and the counterfeiting issues come from public perceptions and public

misconceptions about materials used in packaging. Environmental issues stem

from the idea that packaging is a “necessary evil” needed to deliver a product and

that it uses more materials and is not efficiently designed. Anticounterfeiting

measures, like tamper-evident indications for packaging, are much harder to

quantify, but basically are expected to provide immediate evidence to the con-

sumer that a product is the genuine article.