Poverty hinders battle against fake medicines

Efforts to curb the flow of such drugs across the borders is unlikely to succeed, as police in the northern border regions of Tanga, Kilimanjaro and Arusha have problems battling car thefts driven across the border. Slapping heavy fines on those found with unauthorised drugs on shelves risks destabilizing medical drugs retail trade, and villagers need them.

These issues were discussed in an awareness seminar on fake drugs for district medical drugs inspectors in Njombe region, focusing on removing such medicines from the shelves. It isn’t just drugs but laboratory reagents of various sorts, as hospitals and suppliers depend on retail trade, not having direct access to the Medical Stores Department (MSD) to procure directly from these sources. And even then there would still be a number of challenges to be resolved, chiefly of cheaper, usable medicine being sold.

The problem with the campaign against fake or unapproved drugs is that on the one hand there are really objectionable supplies found on shelves, at times nearing their dates of expiry, if not worse. But the wider issue is the sourcing, that authorities wish for the sale of approved medical drugs produced in the country as we already have attained some reputation regionally in relation to that field. Buyers however do all they can to find a cheaper equivalent when they don’t have ready cash, that is, thousands of households.

There is a maxim that works well in the land market and scarcely applies to the medical drugs retail trade, but be it as it may, regulators will find that it definitely applies, of ‘willing seller and willing buyer,’ that as land can’t be faked (though occupancy titles can be duplicated),l one sees land and that is it. With drugs seeing is just one aspect, but when regulators focus singularly on approval they miss the point. It isn’t due to the presence of unscrupulous middlemen that unauthorised drugs are sold but sheer demand, that so long as a drug is helpful it will have buyers, as drugs don’t sell by first trials but customers returning for it. It means it has passed a minimal test of reliability, not the test of content conformity, etc.

That is why the regulators may have to focus more on information, not simply check what traders do but what users know, for instance if a drug has negative indications, or if it is negatively listed, or has expired, then it is removed. The trouble is that often regulators want rule of thumb prescriptions, that we have malaria drugs here we don’t need to import, whereas we are part of the global liberalized trade order, including at the African level. We should not sign these pacts and then act right on the contrary of it all.