NEW DELHI: When Indians visit their local pharmacy to buy a medicinal product to relieve pain or illness, they face a major hazard: is remedy being handed over the counter genuine or is it just a mixture of say starch, turmeric, maize and chalk?

The first big problem is that the packaging may guarantee nothing. When police raided factories in New Delhi last month, the strip foils of pills and capsules they found stored in boxes looked perfectly genuine. But all the medicines were fake, destined to be sold to pharmacies and then on to unsuspecting Indians in a huge racket that is highly lucrative for the racketeers, but potentially lethal for people’s health.

Such fake medicines normally contain vast quantities of starch and only a minuscule amount of the active ingredient — or often none at all. “The main ingredient is either starch, granules, or chalk,” says a police official. “Calcium sulphate is used to harden up the pills.”

From the purchasing pharmacies point of view, a lower cost often underpins the sale, whereby the pharmacist is tempted not to examine their provenance too carefully.

In other cases though, pharmacists are genuinely unaware that they are buying — and then selling on — a useless drug. Not even bona fide doctors can tell from merely looking at them that these medicines are fake. And as for New Delhi’s 30,000 or so practising ‘quacks’, they are delighted at being able to hand out cheap tablets to their hapless patients.

Manufacturing spurious drugs is a flourishing industry. Most are produced in northern India, but end up being sold all over the country. The Drugs Controller of India reported last year that 20 per cent of the medicines available in the Indian market are bogus. A World Health Authority report estimated that 35 per cent of all the phoney medicines available globally originate in India.

The racket is efficient and streamlined. In one factory, policemen found 660 kgs of fake drugs, 1,000 kgs of raw materials, 24 drug manufacturing machines, dyes, printed aluminium foils, boxes bearing the logos of reputed brands, and rubber seals with different batch numbers.

Aside from damaging the profits of drug companies, fake drugs can be lethal not because they contain dangerous substances, but much more because of what they don’t contain. If a doctor prescribes a drug and the patient comes back a week later still feeling unwell, he or she may prescribe something stronger, more complex or toxic, aggravating the patient’s suffering unnecessarily.

The Indian Medical Association has suggested a clamp-down by drug inspectors on manufacturers and purveyors of bogus drugs through regular raids. But with only about 30 drug inspectors for the whole of New Delhi monitoring about 10,000 pharmacies, it would be hard to make effective.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.