President Trump’s repeated threats to impose punishing tariffs on imported medicines have sparked interest in where Americans’ drugs are produced.
The picture is complex. Most of the time, drugs are not made in a single country from start to finish. More often, a factory imports raw materials that it uses to make a drug’s active ingredients, which then get shipped to a plant in another country that formulates the drug into a tablet or liquid.
U.S. Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit that sets quality standards and tracks the prescription drug supply, shared data with The New York Times that offers a window into the geography of all those shipments. The organization’s data zeros in on supply for Americans and measures it by volume.
A key geographic divide lies in how old medicines are, the data shows. Newer, more expensive patent-protected drugs, like those for cancer and obesity, tend to have their active ingredients made in Europe or the United States. India and China focus on lower-cost generics, such as statins and antibiotics, which account for a vast majority of prescriptions.
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