Clamping down on counterfeit drugs may impact easier access to medicines; but doing nothing about rampant counterfeit drugs can harm or even kill many innocent lives! This is one of the dilemmas our world faces today.
Up until recently, the definition of “counterfeit drugs” has been confused with legitimate generic medicines, poor quality medicines and those illegal copies with violation of intellectual properties protection. There have been some deliberate efforts to confuse the issue further with the intellectual property rights (IPR) elements as evident through the recent high profile disputes between India and EU authorities, vide report from previous issue of eBulletin
Whatever the issue might be, every citizen in the world should be entitled equitable access to quality healthcare services & products. In rich countries like the USA, some 45 million people still have adequate healthcare coverage due to the high cost of insurance; at the other end of the spectrum, millions of poor people in third world countries have never even seen or touch a western medicinal products, let alone have ready access to quality healthcare!
In the rich countries, healthcare financing often is blamed for the inability to provide adequate healthcare services & products. In the poorer countries, the lack of everything – knowledge about how to run a healthcare system, availability of trained healthcare workers, infrastructure to support logiscits & supplies etc. In the end, regardless of economic status, equitable access to basic healthcare remains an unresolved issue in the 21st century world!
As generic medicines cost only a fraction of the orgininator’s branded drugs, they are much more affordable to many developing countries. By interfering the supply of generic medicines, it could simply mean disrupting the access to mainstream healthcare services in such poor countries. With the disruption, the gap will quickly generate demands for alternatives. Often these “demands” will be filled by the less desirable supply sources; and hardly surprisingly enough in today’s globalized world – local bandits will network with international syndicates which deals with anything illegitimate & exploit the weakness of the laws to the fullest.
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In richer economies, the high costs of drug products and services often allow weakness in supply chain to be infiltrated. Obviously, lifestyle-related diseases have big potential and thus often targeted. The advent of internet pharmacies and the ease of international travels help facilitate such activities; but more crucially, the root-causes of the problem obviously have not be addressed adequately either. Lack of access to quality drugs is a relative problem; in political terms, more need to be done. In poorer countries, even if genuine drugs were donated, the lack of infrastructure can simply mean vaccines which need to be stored at 5oC can never find their way to rural places where no such storage facilities will ever be available; while in richer countries, the equitable distribution of healthcare services seem to require quite some re-engineering, too!
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Law enforcement and policy making at both local & international levels must be strengthen further to address the equally sophisticated international syndicates and networks. Often, corruptions can be one single biggest hurdle in the fights against such rampant problems that put many innocent lives at risk and the undermine the trust in healthcare system and professions. Time to rethink the new world order in pharmaceutical crimes...!?
Ng Cheng Tiang
Past-President, PSS
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