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September, 2006 Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, India |
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Govt-Controlled Drugs Vanish From Shelves
Over the last one decade, about a fifth of all medicines, which the government has kept under price control, have either smartly escaped the control norms or have been abandoned by companies in favour of imports. A majority of the medicines have also been outsmarted by alternatives that are outside price controls.
They say that price controls over affordable medicines have made their production unviable and that the trend might become more serious if the government goes ahead with its plan to tighten price controls.
Thee number of companies selling price-controlled medicines such as anti-psychotic drug chloropropamide and red blood cell production helper Riboflavin (Vitamin B1) have come down significantly.
This trend is noticeable in the case of medicines made of at least 15 of the 74 key ingredients under price control, said a member of the retail chemists’ association in New Delhi. “The production of control-free drugs has grown twice (10% CAGR) the production growth of controlled drugs (5.6%) in the last three years,” said a functionary of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, pointing out the decreasing availability of these drugs.
“When a marketing executive meets a doctor, he would spend his limited time to promote a new alternative outside price control. This has led to the use of stronger-than-required medicines, like killing a fly with a machine gun,” said a representative of Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association.
One popular method of evading price control is to produce the drug together with a needless medicine, which will automatically keep the combination outside the scope of control. For example, Doxycycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which is under price control, now comes in combination with lactic acid bacillus — a source of bacteria that helps in digestion.
Sources said that often, drug makers change the ingredients and retain the same brand name without the knowledge of doctors. “This is more dangerous than consuming spurious drugs,” said an office bearer of Retailers & Distributors Chemists Association of Delhi.
The practice, called misbranding, has the potential to cause immense harm due to unfit prescriptions and dispensing. The government has taken note of this and intends to make it mandatory for all brands, now registered under the trade mark law, to be registered with the Central drug regulator too.
Also, many of the locally made drugs have now been replaced by costly imports, as the government has no means to visit the factories in other countries to do a cost analysis of the declared landed cost. In the case of imports, companies can claim 50% of landed cost as manufacturers’ margin. Despite all this, the biggest attraction of greater government control would be an overnight fall in drug prices.
Date: 17-Jul-2006
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