Fake durgs, corrupt medicos

Muhammad Ahseem
Lack of a healthy drug policy in J&K has been taking a heavy toll. The latest victim is a seven-day-old baby, who died in G B Pant children hospital. Media reports indicate the neonatal was injected expired medicine.

Negligence of such criminal nature has been reported many times in the past, however, the insensitive attitude of authorities towards such incidents has kept those who sell fake and substandard drugs especially to government hospitals in business, of course in connivance with people in hospital administration.
The mere presence of expired drugs in the only children’s hospital of valley is indicative of the degree of callousness of the hospital administration. Whole hierarchy of the hospital from medical superintendent to pharmacist and the storekeeper are directly responsible for the death of the neonatal.

The spurious drug industry is worth around 15000 crores in India and J&K has its own share of this menace. Drug manufacturing industry in India is governed by Drug Council of India which is the only authority to issue drug manufacturing licenses. However, all is not well with the control mechanism and hundreds of units in many north-Indian states manufacture fake and spurious drugs. These medicines are distributed freely in J&K, especially the valley, due to lack of an effective control mechanism. Corrupt medicos, medical superintendents and other members of hospital administration facilitate the distribution of such spurious drugs inside and outside hospitals.

A common phenomenon that surfaced in valley over some years is that doctors themselves get distribution rights for a substandard drug company and then prescribe its medicines to earn some quick bucks. Such medicines, according to sources in pharma industry, carry a profit margin of more than 500 percent.
Another major problem that has spread its tentacles throughout the valley is the growing number of unlicensed chemists. Such chemist shops are the main dispensers of these spurious and fake drugs. In the absence of any controlling mechanism, such chemist shops sell anything from spurious drugs to samples meant for doctors and even medicines meant for hospital supplies.

The generic medicines for which India is known for, is another factor jeopardizing the health of hapless commoners. Alteration of a medical prescription is considered a crime in the medical world. However in J&K it is a norm rather than an exception. Chemists, selling medicines mainly outside hospitals more often than not alter the prescription. The helpless patients have to suffer for these chemists hardly keep standard drugs. In a recent move a medical superintendent of a major hospital of Srinagar devised his own method to prevent ignorant patients falling prey to these greedy chemists, by closing permanently one of the gates of the hospital.

The move is appreciable; however this is not the panacea for the problem that has taken deep roots. The need of the hour is to bring in stringent and effective control measures at the policy level to prevent the growing menace of the spurious and fake drug culture from turning into a full scale mafia.