Mexican president inaugurates centralized ‘super pharmacy’ to supply entire country
Mexico’s president inaugurated a huge “super pharmacy” Friday in a bid to end the woes of patients throughout the country who are often told they need a specific medicine — but the hospital in question doesn’t have it.
President Andrés Manuel Lópezobrador’s solutionwas to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.
“The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the heath system,” López Obrador said Friday.
Thepharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can’t get needed medications at a localhospital, thepatient, the patient’s doctor or the pharmacist would be able to call up the warehouse and get it delivered from the huge 430,000 square foot Mexico City warehouse.
The armed forces, or the government-run pharmaceutical company Birmex, will ship the drugs out by land or air “within 24 to 48 hours,” López Obrador pledged.
The question is whether
Mexico can overcome its history of being bad at regulating the pharmaceutical industry, bad at buying medicines, bad at storing them, and bad at distributing them. Extreme centralization also hasn’t helped Mexico much in the past inmany areas.
The most visible face of this problem are the parents of children with cancer, who frequently stage protests because they say that in recent years chemotherapy and other drugs have been impossible to obtain.
Desperate parents blocked traffic at themexico City airport last year, holding up a banner reading: “There isn’t
any chemotherapy, treatment or medicines, have some empathy and sensitivity.”
The problems have killed otherwise healthy people. Because Mexico has had problems in obtaining enough morphine, anesthesiologists in Mexico have had to carry aroundtheir ownvials of the sedative, drawing multiple doses out of a single vial for routine procedures like spinal blocks during births.
Intheunitedstates, where there is no shortage of morphine, doctors are advised to drawasingledose fromavial and throwthe remainder out.
But in Mexico, that has led to contamination of the vials, triggering outbreaks of injection-inducedmeningitis in two Mexican states that have killed dozens of people — includingsomeamericans who sought treatment at clinics in the border city ofmatamoros, across frombrownsville, Texas.
López Obrador mounted a major effort to obtain COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, using the armed forces to distribute them and volunteers to help apply them, and by the end of that year just about anybody in Mexicowhowantedavaccinegot one, for free.
But trying toreplicatethat model of centralized government purchasing and army distribution on a national scale for thousands of medications is not the same, according to Mauricio Rodríguez, a professor at the School of Medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
“This is crazy,” said Rodríguez, noting the government is opening the centralized warehouse without answering howthe systemwill operate, especially for urgently-needed medications. He noted that concentrating all the drugs at one site increases risks, andcould sideline some already-existing distribution systems.