To understand how risky drugs could end up in your medicine cabinet, ProPublica spent more than a year and a half investigating the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of the foreign factories that make generic medications and have been cited for violating critical quality standards. It quickly became clear through our reporting that patients and doctors don’t reliably have the information they need to make informed decisions about the medicines they take or prescribe. ProPublica has created Rx Inspector, a tool that aims to help. You can look up your generic prescription drugs, and we’ll guide you to the specific facility that made them. We were able to link more than 80% of generic prescription drug products in our database to a factory that made them using databases of label information, manufacturing facilities and location data that we sued the FDA for. Additionally, we included the history of FDA actions at those facilities based on a trove of inspection records we assembled. The FDA publishes warning letters that detail “significant violation(s) of federal requirement(s).” We obtained these from the FDA’s website going back to 2020. We used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find hundreds of import alert lists published by the FDA over more than 15 years. The lists identified factories banned from shipping drugs to the United States because the FDA found manufacturing violations. Note: Try this tool for yourself here. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption. - ProPublica