Rx Inspector
Look Up Where Your Generic Prescription Drugs Were Made
The FDA won’t tell Americans where their generic drugs are made, so ProPublica did it instead. Use information on your prescription label to locate the factory and see inspection reports.
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Frequently Asked Questions What Is Rx Inspector?
Labels on pill bottles may list the distributor or repackager of a generic drug, but they don’t always show where it was really made. Without that critical information, you can’t learn what the Food and Drug Administration discovered if and when that factory was inspected for quality and safety violations.
How Does It Work?
You enter in the name of your generic prescription drug, as well as the company name found on your pill bottle or drug label. We then search through our database for potential matches. If there are multiple matches, you can narrow your search using the markings found on a pill or other filtering options. If you have a National Drug Code on the package, you can use that as well.
When you click on the drug, we will show you any manufacturing facilities we have been able to connect to it. Clicking on a facility will let you see information on where the facility is located, what other drugs it makes and any FDA inspection information.
What Is ProPublica?
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. As part of our “Rx Roulette” series, we have been investigating the FDA’s oversight of generic drugs. The nation’s health care system has come to rely on generics — which are often cheaper than their brand-name counterparts — to ensure patients have reliable access to affordable medications. Generics now make up about 90% of the prescription drugs dispensed in the U.S.
We’ve found that the agency quietly allowed some substandard foreign factories to continue shipping medication to the United States after flagging violations so severe that the facilities were officially banned from the U.S. market. When the FDA let drugs from those factories in, the agency did not regularly test them to ensure they would not put patients at risk.
When ProPublica hired a lab to test samples of an important generic for organ transplant patients, we found quality concerns that could compromise their effectiveness. We also found that the FDA preemptively blocks out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets and confidential information.
Which Drugs Are Included?
Our ongoing reporting has focused on the safety of generic drugs, which represent the vast majority of all prescriptions filled in the United States. Thus, the tool does not include brand-name or over-the-counter drugs. Further, we excluded gases (like oxygen tanks) and intradermal route drugs (many of these were allergy tests for things like feline hair). We included biological drug products,