While fighting the spurious-drug menace has been like playing whack-a-mole for long, but a Thursday report about the success story of seizing a large quantity of spurious drugs during raids on two factories and three warehouses in the capital’s Mitford and Keraniganj area has assured us that if the law enforcers are honestly willing, then the manufacturing and selling of adulterated and fake drugs can’t go on unabated. Reports have it that a mobile court backed by the Rapid Action Battalion sealed a factory manufacturing fake antibiotics for the treatment of asthma and allergies and vitamin tablets and its sales outlet in the city on Wednesday. The sealed factory was at Keraniganj, and the sales outlet at Mitford Medicine Market.
Counterfeit or ‘fake’ drugs are unsafe because they are usually low-quality products that contain no active ingredient, the wrong dose of the active ingredient or, worse still, toxic solvents such as boric acid or rat poison. Therefore such drugs are rarely efficacious. Worse, they can have serious adverse effects. How many deaths are caused by fake medicines is not known, but the dangers are clear. On July 22 this year, a court verdict sentenced three persons of a pharmaceutical company to 10-year imprisonment for their role in the deaths of 76 children who died after taking adulterated paracetamol syrup produced and marketed by that company.
However, the size of the fake drugs market is around Tk 1,500 crore and the total market size is around Tk 10 thousand crore, according to a Dhaka University teacher. Around 100 small unauthorised and suspended companies, mostly located on the outskirts of the capital, produce various types of fake drugs for various diseases, including for gastric and heart complications, vitamins, injections, oral saline, anti- cancer and drugs for other deadly diseases. There are 1.1 lakh registered pharmacies all over the country and the number of unregistered pharmacies is not less than two lakh. Very regrettably, the Drug Administration (DA), to counter the counterfeit medicine, has earned an image of a gloomy shadow of a lame horse. They don’t have enough surveillance over the spurious drug trade market.The medicine market in Mitford is the hub of trade in illegal drugs and more surprisingly, almost all the medicine shops there are involved in dealing in fake drugs. But the office of the Drug Superintendent conducted only a few drives in this area in the last one year and a half — a lack of manpower being the main excuse.
Our viewpoint is that enactment and enforcement of new laws for prohibiting counterfeit drugs are vital. Existing drug related laws including the Drug Ordinance of 1982 and the Drug Act of 1940 should be reformed to make them more functional and effective. The profit taking ill mind-set of the businessmen must be checked for the greater public interest and the unholy nexus of producers, suppliers and even some doctors (prescribers) should be cut off to uphold professional ethics.
