THERE are a number of issues regarding pharmacies in the Kingdom that should be discussed, the recently raised problems of fake medicine being just one of them. A member of the Shoura Council pointed out that 13 percent of the medicines on pharmacy shelves in the Kingdom are fake. With only 60 inspectors for over 4,000 pharmacies nationwide, it is little wonder that abuses, both conscious and unconscious, pepper the system. Fake medicines present an obvious danger to everyone. Off-patent generic drugs are one thing, a market that really has not been opened up in Saudi Arabia. Such medicines are safe and manufactured by companies with reputations which can generally be trusted. These medicines are not fake but are simply manufactured based on a patented recipe which is now available to any manufacturer, not just the original patent holder. Fake drugs, however, are counterfeit drugs, manufactured by someone worthy of the same confidence afforded those who counterfeit money. In other words, there is no reason to trust them. There are other issues which should also be addressed, specifically the need for a doctor's prescription to obtain certain drugs. Although tranquilizers and stimulants – two types of drugs highly susceptible to abuse – are tightly controlled and require a prescription to be dispensed, a wide array of antidepressants, antibiotics and other drugs are available just for the asking. The danger of abuse of these drugs is small but the dangers of overdoses or lethally mixing them with other drugs is a reality. As drugs become more sophisticated, the dispensing of such drugs demands an equal sophistication on the part of the one dispensing them. It should be entirely in a doctor's hands – not that of the pharmacist nor the self-diagnosing patient – to determine who gets these drugs. It is the role of the government and its regulating agencies to ensure that everyone have access to the medicines they need; it is also the role of the government to ensure that the medicine is dispensed in a manner that it guarantees that it is ingested safely and not at the whim of a patient. __
