Fast-moving congressional legislation on drug package bar coding gives pharmaceutical manufacturers a short-term reprieve from what they view as an impending California e-pedigree death sentence. But the timeline for manufacturers spending millions on packaging line upgrades will likely be pushed back only three or four years. At that point they will have to print on the packages of the smallest salable units 2D bar codes containing a product's National Drug Code, a unique serial number, lot number, and expiration date. Very few manufacturers are doing that today despite the fact the California deadline to put those 2D labels on half of all products coming into that state is January 1, 2015. The other half would have to be 2D-barcoded one year later.
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