April 7, 2002	Sunday	Muharram 23, 1423

PESHAWAR, April 6: The Pakistan Chemists and Druggist Association, NWFP, organized hunger strike camps throughout the province on Saturday, asking the government to withdraw the General Sales Tax (GST) imposed on the drugs, and provide relief to the people, who were already overburdened with high inflation.

“This is a conspiracy being hatched by the bureaucrats to defame President Gen Pervez Musharraf among the public so that he could not win the presidential referendum to be held in the first week of May,” alleged Arbab Javed Ahmed, PCDA President, Peshawar district, at a hunger strike camp set up at Soekarno Chowk.

He rebuked Gen Musharraf’s last night speech where he claimed to have taken host of measures to alleviate the sufferings of the common man, saying that drugs were also used by 85 per cent poor masses living in the rural areas of the country and be exempted from the levy forthwith.

Arbab warned the government to withdraw the recently announced 15 per cent GST on drugs immediately and save the people from being affected by the hike in the drug prices due to the imposition of the GST. “After this one-day hunger strike, we will arrange such camps for an indefinite period if our demands aren’t met .... (and) by next Saturday 65,000 chemists, their families and thousands of other people attached with the pharmaceutical business, will reject Gen Musharraf in presidential referendum,” he stressed.

On the occasion, PCDA provincial chairman Haji Arshad Siddiqui proposed to the government to force the MNCs and local companies to donate Rs100 million and Rs10 million, respectively, out of their annual profit to the government and save the poor people from being fleeced. In this way, he claimed the government could collect more than its projected amount of Rs4 billion from the GST.

Some 630 national pharmaceutical firms were unable to compete with the 26 MNCs in the country, considering the unethical promotional tactics adopted by the MNCs, he said, adding the MNCs gave luxury and costly gifts, including cars, and sponsored foreign tours of doctors and their families and organised seminars in five star hotels to promote their products. They charged 400-500 per cent more prices than the local companies for the same products from the consumers.

The new tax, he said, would deprive the poor people to seek treatment for their ailments as the prices of the locally-manufactured drugs, on which they were dependent, would also register 18 per cent hike.

Association Vice Chairman Abdul Hadi Khan alleged that the Ministry of Health was in league with the MNCs and asked the government to introduce the system of marketing all medicines on generic names. This, he said, would provide a rational pricing mechanism and the people would also get a clear picture about the drug trade in the country.

“We can unveil the wrongdoings of the MNCs that how they bleed the poor people white and take away millio