PESHAWAR, Nov 5: The sale of spurious drugs poses serious health hazards for the people in the city and elsewhere in the NWFP, doctors and pharmacists complained.

Medical preparations of dubious quality — including antibiotics, painkillers, steroids, antidepressants, sedatives, laxatives, tranquillisers, cough syrups and injectables — are being marketed and sold in the city’s largest pharmaceutical market, Namak Mandi, trickling down to rural areas all over the province.

“We prescribe quality medicines to patients, but chemists (are in the habit of) giving them substandard and low-priced drugs ... obviously (for) more profit”, said a doctor at the Lady Reading Hospital.

Many patients, he said, had complained of ineffectiveness of certain drugs that had benefited them on earlier occasions, because chemists give them fake versions of the medicine.

He attributed the trend of selling substandard drugs to more profit-taking.

He said that the high-quality pharmaceutical items manufactured by multinational corporations were sold at a higher price, adding that the price tags of these drugs pushed them out of the reach of most of patients.

Owing to their lower prices, he said, both the chemists and patients preferred substandard medicines.

Multinationals, he said, offered a commission between Rs10 and Rs15 on the sale of their drugs, while commissions given by local companies exceed Rs60 besides offering lucrative bonuses.

Another aspect which makes substandard products more lucrative to chemists is their tendency to defer payments by as much as three months while the multinationals demand on the spot payments for their products at the time of delivery.

A case in point is a painkiller injection ‘diclofenac,’ which is manufactured by more than 100 pharmaceutical firms. Prices of the drug range between Rs3 to Rs30. Doctors say that all of these injections, though containing same ingredients, were not equally effective.

The same is true for other drugs, like amoxillin, ampicillin, cifrofloxacine, metronidazole, cemetidine, etc.

Doctors say that 365 local companies are unable to keep up with the 30 multinational corporations in terms of maintaining the quality of their products. They said that in a bid to maximize their sales, local manufacturers compromised on the quality of their products without caring for their ill effects on the people’s health.

The sale of spurious drugs in the city as well as rural areas of the province is spiralling and patients, despite the best of their efforts, fail to find genuine medicine.

A pharmacist said that the availability of only 400 drugs was enough to treat almost all kinds of diseases, while 38,000 drugs have been registered with the federal health ministry in Islamabad.

He said that if we take into account the number of unregistered drugs like the stuff smuggled from India and Iran, the number could well be over 50,000.

Some drugs, he said, did not carry drug-related literature, price, manufacturing and expiry dates, creating confusion in the minds of health professionals.

The problem has been aggravated by the prevalence of corruption among drug inspectors, allowing chemists to wreak havoc upon the people’s lives.

Drug inspectors — numbering 18 in total and are supposed to curb the mushrooming sale of spurious drugs — complained about the lack of facilities to cover 24 districts, seven tribal agencies and six frontier regions.