Medicinal drugs policy would protect us against bullying pharma giants

Your newspaper reported that the British drug giant Glaxo- SmithKline had misled the medical world and consumers by withholding evidence that their new antidepressant drug was not only ineffective but harmful to children. Glaxo finally admitted negligence and paid billions of dollars in compensation.

As reported in The New York Times, in 2005 the City of New York filed law suits against several top companies for inflating prices and cheating tax-payers.

We need a National Medicinal Drug Policy:

1. To ensure the availability, affordability and efficacy of safe and good quality medicines relevant to the healthcare needs of the people in a sustainable and equitable manner.

2. To make compulsory the rational use of these medicines by healthcare professionals and consumers, or the use of generics.

3. To promote locally manufactured essential medicines.

In 1991 and 1996, the Health Ministry made two attempts to get Cabinet approval for a National Medicinal Drug Policy. Both failed. Why the inordinate delay to present a bill on National Medicinal Drug Policy?

Addressing a workshop on January 15, 2011, Minister of Health Maithripala Sirisena said his ministry was a bottomless pit of corruption and vowed to clean it up and implement the policy. This is encouraging, but his powers are limited to the confines of his ministry. The Legal Draftsman’s Department is outside his purview.

It is worth tracing the history of medicinal drugs reforms.

In the early 1960s, Professor Senaka Bibile ( 1920- 77), pharmacologist and Dean of the Medical Faculty (Peradeniya), was asked to recommend a system for selecting drugs for hospital supplies. He responded with the Ceylon Hospital Formulary, which listed some 600 drugs under their generic names. The World Health Organisation and UNCTAD based their policies of rational pharmaceutical use on Professor Bibile’s policy.

Professor Bibile’s contribution was received with overwhelming support at the 35th World Health Assembly, in Geneva, in May 1982, causing severe losses to the multinationals.

UNCTAD studied Sri Lanka’s experience and, satisfied that the model could be used to develop and implement drug policies in Third World nations, obtained Professor Bibile’s services.

A document called “Case studies in transfer of technology; pharmaceutical policies in Sri Lanka”, was published as a guideline to initiate reforms in other nations. Professor Bibile died under mysterious circumstances in September 1977, in Guyana, while on a mission to assist them.

The true nature of the multinational pharma giants, whose collective funding and turnover is a close second to the global arms trade, has spread its tentacles to reach, invade and command individuals dealing with all stages of the industry, including the prescribing and dispensing of medicinal drugs. K. K. S. Perera

Panadura