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.