‘The challenge of spurious drugs’

This is apropos a Business Recorder editorial “The challenge of spurious drugs” carried by the newspaper recently. The newspaper has argued, among other things, that “spurious medicines and adulterated food items constitute a huge national challenge. While people are fed dead animal meat and cockroach-enriched dishes even in some plush restaurants, the unscrupulous people mint billions by mixing pesticides, rat poison, brick dust and paint among other ingredients to manufacture fake medicines. How roaring is this business could be ascertained from the fact that in 2016 3,592 medical outlets and factories were sealed in Punjab alone.”

The situation underscores the need for framing new laws and introducing a culture of strict enforcement of rules and regulations with a view to dealing with the challenge of spurious drugs in an effective and meaningful manner. The actions taken by the Punjab government, for example, have failed to curb the menace of fake drugs; nor have they contributed towards creating any significant deterrent to the crime of manufacturing and selling spurious drugs.

Lahore Salman Ahmed