On Initiation of Criminal Cases in Crimes Related to the Shadow Flows of Pharmaceutical Products

Having analyzed the law enforcement practice that emerged after Art. 235.1, 238.1, 327.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation have entered into force, the authors employ an empirical generalization to identify the most relevant and sought-after methods for committing crimes related to the shadow circulation of pharmaceutical products, which turned out to be correlatively interconnected with the corresponding reasons for initiating criminal cases in crimes of this category. Due to the Federal Law No. 532-FZ of the Russian Federation dated December 31, 2014, the Criminal Code of Russia has included the following norms: illegal production of medicines and medical devices (Article 235.1 of the Criminal Code of Russia); circulation of counterfeit, substandard and unregistered medicines, medical devices, and circulation of counterfeit biologically active additives (Article 238.1 of the Criminal Code of Russia); forgery of documents for medicines or medical products or packages of medicines or medical products (Article 327.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The empirical analysis allows us to conclude that the most detectable methods are: sales of unregistered drugs (43.7%); illegal production of medical devices (26.9%), and the most relevant reason for initiating a criminal case is a crime report received from other sources. The authors identify typical problem situations and propose recommendations for their minimization.

Keywords

Authors

References