TOBA TEK SINGH: A special team of the health department consisting of two drug inspectors from Faisalabad and one from Toba and the District Quality Control Board secretary inspected a herbal drug manufacturing company’s office and store here and collected samples of some herbal medicines to get them tested.

On the directions of the Lahore High Court (LHC), Faisalabad drug inspectors Mohsin Asghar and Khalid Mustafa, Toba’s Saqib Javed and Secretary Junaid Arshad sent the samples to a government-run laboratory in Lahore.

Team head Asghar told reporters five months ago a quack named Naeem Ashraf was arrested from Faisalabad and medicines mixed with a heavy quantity of steroids seized from him. The medicines were supposedly meant for people looking to gain weight. After getting them tested from a laboratory, it was revealed they could be fatal.

Medicines said to be containing heavy quantity of steroids

The suspect had also disclosed during interrogation he was selling the medicines manufactured by a herbal company in Toba. When Ashraf recently filed an application before the LHC for bail, the health department produced its report about the medicines over which the court rejected his bail plea and directed the department to send a special team to examine the herbal company’s medicines.

Javed told reporters several gangs here were involved in preparation of a medicine, Vital Force, and due to their enmities with each other, four people in this business had been murdered in the last few years. He said gangs had set up herbal factories in villages also and some had taken them to other small towns of the country due to continuous raids. He said medicines were supplied all over the country through parcels booked by the local post office. He claimed recently his department had written to the Federal Investigation Agency director general to order the post office to stop booking parcels of such drugs.

Anjuman Shahrian President Mian Ihsanul Haq Burki said whenever the health department raided these “fake” herbal factories, “someone from within the department tipped off factory owners”, who paid bribes to informers within the department hence nothing was found mostly.

He further said former district coordination officer Farah Masood had taken the issue head on and stopped the local post office from booking suspicious parcels, but after her transfer the gangs again reappeared. A post office official claimed they were bound to book parcels as they had not received any written order to stop such bookings.

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2016