With anarchy in the medicinal drugs market and with physicians, patients and pharmacies confused as to which drug is the safest, most effective and affordable, the Health Ministry needs to be reminded again that it must give priority to the restoration of a health service where the well-being of the patients is given top priority.
The Health Ministry and two health ministers for the past eight years have been giving various reasons or excuses for the delay in the implementation of the National Medicinal Drugs Policy (NMDP) based on the principles of one of the world’s most respected pharmacologists Dr. Senaka Bibile.

The cabinet of the United People’s Freedom Alliance Government in October 2005 approved a comprehensive draft of the NMDP. But, despite promises after promises and even court action by the People’s Movement for the Rights of Patients (PMRP), it now seems that 2013 will also pass without regulations to implement the NMDP under which quality drugs could be made available to the people at affordable prices .

Trans-national drug companies, their trading agents here, and their collaborators – including medical specialists and top Health Ministry officials – argue that Prof. Bibile’s policies are fundamentally Marxist or socialist. They say these policies do not fit into the globalised capitalist market economic system.
These critics need to be reminded that the biggest capitalist country the United States  has effectively implemented the Bibile policies. So have many other western countries, while the World Health Organisation itself has hailed and recommended these policies.

Those who oppose or are blocking regulations to implement the Bibile policies need to be given a grave warning – if health is kept in the market it means the poor will die. Big Pharma and its self-centred supporters here must know that they will reap the consequences of being directly responsible for the deaths of poor patients.
At present a world record number of more than 13,000 varieties of drugs are registered for import, prescription and sale in Sri Lanka. If regulations for the Bibile policy are implemented, there will be an essential drugs list comprising about 1000 varieties. The list will be worked out by an Independent National Medicinal Drug Regulatory Authority (NMDRA) comprising physicians, pharmacists and chemists whose integrity is not questionable and who have no conflict of interests.

The NMDRA will decide on the essential drugs based on five factors – quality, safety, efficiency, the cost of the drug and the need for it. When this is done, and drugs are bought from a few TNCs and neighbouring countries. It would be possible for NMDRA members or qualified people designated by it to visit the production sites and check the process. It would also be possible for the National Drug Quality Assurance Laboratory to check the quality of the drugs while post-marketing surveillance also could be carried out more effectively.

At the Bibile commemoration meeting recently, Health Minister Maithripala Sirisena charged that legislation to implement the Bibile policies had disappeared from the office of the retired Chief Legal Draftswoman. He also charged that she was now working as a consultant for the Chamber of Pharmaceutical Traders. The retired draftswoman however has refuted these charges and says she gave the draft legislation to the Minister and Health Ministry where it disappeared for an obvious reasons. She also refuted the Minister’s charge that she was a consultant to the drug chamber, saying an offer had been made but she rejected it.

Why all this bluff, hypocrisy and deception? If the Health Ministry is playing with the lives of the people, then the people have a responsibility to come out and demand who is playing the devil and setting up graveyards instead of hospitals for the people.