The Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD for short) is a regulation passed by the EU Parliament in 2016 which is in force from the 9th of February 2019. The new regulation requires the addition of safety features on the packaging of all medicines to verify the authenticity of the medicine from the point of manufacturing until at the endpoint with the patient.
This regulation enforces two fundamental changes in how medicine is packaged: the addition of an anti-tampering device and the addition of a unique identifier for each medicine package. The unique identifier comes in the form of a 2D data matrix barcode.