LAHORE: Pakistan has become a major market for smuggled and sub-standard aphrodisiacs in the absence of regulation of import, manufacturing, supply and sale of such drugs.
Every drug must undergo rigorous testing before it is introduced into the market. However, sexual enhancement drugs, both smuggled and locally manufactured, are being sold in the country without clinical trials.
These drugs are sold over the counter in the form of pills, capsules, drops, sprays, syrups, food supplements and tonics, a Lahore-based wholesale dealer told Dawn.
He said Indian and Chinese aphrodisiacs were widely available in Pakistan, reaching here via Afghanistan, and fetching the sellers ‘blind’ margins amid high demand.
Doctors and pharmacists say 70pc of these drugs are sub-standard and warn that self-medication and over-the-counter sale is a serious threat to the users’ health. Besides the health factor, there is money to be earned here, provided the government is willing to regulate the sex drugs business.
Noor Mohammad Mehr, a pharmacist with additional training in law, cites a study conducted in 2012-13. The study put the total annual value of sexual enhancement drugs in the country at Rs1.3 billion.
The report was compiled by a Lahore-based non-governmental organisation – Medicare Health Foundation.
Mehr says there are some 30 brands that have ‘captured’ the market of sexual enhancement drugs. A majority of them are smuggled through Afghanistan. “Apart from this, the pack of local manufacturers of allopathic sexual enhancement drugs is led by two Karachi-based pharmaceutical companies.”
In addition to a wide range of allopathic medicines, freely available in the market are homoeopathic and herbal varieties.
“There are an estimated 30,000 unregistered herbal medicine companies operating in Pakistan and almost 90 per cent of them are selling ‘powerful herbal sex medicines’,” Mehr told Dawn.
Peshawar and Quetta are said to be the hub of smuggled sex drugs. Swat, Charsadda, Karachi, Lahore and some regions in the federally administered tribal areas (Fata) are some of the places where 'sub-standard’ sex medicines are being manufactured in large quantities.
“In 2005 a leading multinational pharmaceutical company tried to get a sex medicine approved in Pakistan, but the scheme was deferred by the federal government after an outcry by religious scholars, who declared the business un-Islamic,” Noor Mehr recalled.
He said applications from eight pharmaceutical companies, including a multinational firm, are still pending with the federal government for registration of sex drugs.
Health hazards
Dr Ikram Ghouri, a physician at the Shaikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore, says “excessive use of drugs for sexual enhancement can lead to heart attack or chronic renal failure”.
He says qualified doctors always discourage the use of medicines for sexual enhancement without a medical history or proper clinical investigation.
According to him, a majority of such medicines available in the local market are dangerous for kidney.
“Around five out of one hundred cases of chronic renal failure in Pakistan are because of frequent use of sub-standard sex drugs which are mostly available in the name of herbal medicines,” Dr Ghouri said.
“A doctor normally recommends tests to know hormone deficiency, which is the only proper way to improve sexual desire and at the same, avoid risk of adverse effects on health. The use of sex medicines without any medical or scientific reasons is against the principles or medical ethics,” Dr Ghouri added.
According to the doctor, often metal is used in making herbal sex drugs and a popular variety of this type is kushta. “Kushta is extremely dangerous for users who have cardiac diseases or blood pressure history. In cases of cardiac and blood pressure patients, a prescription of even globally recommended sexual drugs must be accompanied by strict medical advice.”