PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department has claimed major gains in a clampdown on unlawful drug manufacturing and sale in the province last year.

In a report, the drug control and pharmacy department at the provincial Directorate General Health Services said that 51 FIRs were registered against those involved in unlawful drug sale and Rs12.825 million fine was collected from them through the courts of law.

The directorate also collected 12,292 suspected medicine samples last year and found 497 of them to be substandard, 226 spurious, 225 unregistered and 160 misbranded.

According to the report, sealed 162 medical stores last year for violating the law.

Says 51 FIRs registered, 162 medical stores sealed, Rs12.8m fines collected last year

The merged and tribal districts have around 20,250 pharmacies.

The health directorate said that 12,292 medicine samples and medical devices were sent to the Drug Testing Laboratory for quality checking, while a dozen “special” raids were carried out, seizing unregistered, fake and counterfeit drugs in large quantities.

It said it referred a total of 2,447 cases of law violations to the Provincial Quality Control Board for action, with 637 later being sent to the drug court for decision. The court later decided 377 cases.

The health directorate said over 1,000 drug sale points were inspected in the province every month to ensure quality control and regulatory compliance in line with the Drug Act, 1976.

In the report submitted to the health secretary, the directorate said that with the help of 55 inspectors, it expedited inspections to ensure and implement the pharmaceutical jurisprudence in respect of sale, distribution and dispensing of drugs for public consumption as per the law.

According to it, therapeutic goods, including drugs, medicines, medical devices and alternative medicines are regulated under the Drugs Act, 1976, and Drug Regulatory of Pakistan Act, 2012.

The law empowers the federal government to issue drug manufacturing licences, register medicines, fix their prices and examine matters related to import and export of therapeutic goods.

However, Section 44 of the Drugs Act allows provinces to regulate drug sale and related matters through the prescribed rules.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Drugs Rules, 1982, (amended in 2017) are in force to deal with the affairs of therapeutic goods.

Health officials told Dawn that the department had introduced a new drug testing technology, Raman, to facilitate analysts to examine suspected medicines on the spot and save time and risks associated with raw material analysis.

They said prior to the introduction of the new technology in 2022, all suspected samples were tested with the help of traditional methods that consumed a lot of time.

The officials said that the new system helped test the quality of more and more medicines in the shortest possible time.

They said that Raman was a spectroscopic technique accepted both by the United States Pharmacopia Convention and European Pharmacopia.

The officials said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was the first province to introduce the technology for drug testing.

They said the technology was already used abroad for raw material clearance and identification of narcotics at airports and borders.

The officials said that before the installation of new machines, they faced a lot of difficulties in obtaining the suspected pharmaceutical items from the market and testing them.

They, however, said the Raman technology helped inspectors find suspected drugs on the spot and test them in the laboratory.

Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2026