Teva Truck: Top 10 Pharma Cargo Thefts

Teva Truck

Date: April 16, 2009
Time: 11:00 PM
Location: New Jersey
Value: $11.8 million
Drugs Stolen: Multiple sclerosis treatment Copaxone

The lone truck driver delivered the trailer to an unsecured lot at approximately 4:00 PM that day. Surveillance footage shows the trailer being removed from the lot at approximately 11:00 PM. The driver discovered the trailer missing the following morning at 5:30 AM. 

The consequences of a theft reverberate far beyond the contents of one tractor-trailer. Many shipments are at least partially recovered, but this offers little relief for the victims. As FreightWatch analyst Dan Burges cites in an interview with Newsweek, "Almost exclusively [recovered drugs] are destroyed. And that magnifies the economic impact of pharmaceutical theft--if a pharmaceutical company produces a particular product of a particular lot number, often the FDA requires that they recall and destroy all of that lot number, even from shipments that weren't stolen."

Resolution: The tractor trailer was recovered (empty) on the New Jersey Turnpike four days later. The shipment contents were recovered, intact, on June 10 in a non-temperature controlled sea container.