PESHAWAR, Dec 14: Many wholesale pharmacists are selling drugs stolen from local hospitals in collaboration with health officials, chemists and health workers told Dawn.

"Many wholesale drug sellers are making huge profits by selling drugs meant for hospital patients. It is now an 'established' business being carried out with the connivance of drug inspectors," said a chemist at the Namak Mandi, which is dotted by scores of wholesale outlets.

Drugs stolen from the Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber Teaching Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex were 'sold' to drug sellers by the staff of the hospitals at throwaway prices, he said. Dealers somehow remove the hospital stamps from the drug packets.

"All drugs are stamped 'Not for sale', but drug dealers use ink-removing solutions to remove it," he said. A whole-seller in the same market said that some of the stamps are hard to remove for which the dealers manufacture their own stickers to cover them.

Drug sellers usually offer the hospital staff - who usually do not differentiate between antibiotics, pain-killers and life-saving drugs - only 20 per cent of the original price, he said.

For example, dealers try to remove stamps from injection ampoules by applying acid or ink-removing solutions, he said. If that does not work, they put them in boiling water for a while to remove the original sticker.

Drug dealers, he said, were minting millions while poor patients run from pillar to post in their unending quest for medicine. Another source said that some of the drugs carried stamps printed directly on them, which proved to be a little more problematic to remove.

These drugs, he said, were sent to Afghanistan. "Antibiotics have a vast market in Afghanistan as they are hard to obtain there. They get a higher price there." "Even public sector hospitals in Afghanistan use drugs stolen from Peshawar hospitals," said an Afghan doctor.

Hospital sources said that these drugs were stolen regularly. They argued that each hospital had a bulk store from which drugs were issued to wards on a weekly basis. In-charge nurses of every ward maintained stock registers of drugs, said the sources. They issued drugs to patients on a daily basis and enter their names on the expense register.

"Most of the nurses or dispensers issue drugs in the names of patients to whom these aren't actually given. Hospital pharmacists, who are supposed to check the expense of the previously-issued drugs, do not check the register properly and issue new drugs for the next week," sources added.

Hospital sources said that the charge of drugs was kept by specific nurses for longer periods. Likewise, the hospitals' store-keepers and pharmacists remained 'unchanged' for more than a decade. "In such circumstances, there is no way that this practice can be stopped, because the people involved in the racket are well-entrenched," sources said.