LCCI provides support: Pharma industry opposes changes to Drug Act

Officials say stakeholders have not been taken on board

LAHORE: The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has appealed to Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif to take immediate notice of the miseries of Punjab’s pharmaceutical sector and resolve their problems on priority.

Supporting the cause of the pharmaceutical industry, LCCI President Abdul Basit, Senior Vice President Amjad Ali Jawa and Vice President Muhammad Nasir Hameed Khan said the challenges should be addressed at the earliest in order to protect economic interests of the country.



They said that in the recent past, the Punjab government had made amendments to the Punjab Drug Act 2017 against which people from the pharmaceutical industry staged a protest in February this year.

During the protest, more than a dozen people, including two senior police officers, lost their lives in a bomb blast. Following this, the government postponed implementation of the amendments made to the Drug Act.

The LCCI officials said over 20 meetings had been held and talks were going on to address genuine reservations of the pharma industry and assurances were given by Provincial Minister for Law and Parliamentary Affairs Rana Sanaullah to get the final draft of the negotiated amendments approved by the Punjab Assembly.

However, all of a sudden, earlier amendments have been implemented without taking the stakeholders on board.

They revealed E&Y company had hired junior executives, who visited a pharma factory, and they had almost no experience, but they were questioning those who had experience of decades.



The LCCI office-bearers said the drug regulators should take the stakeholders on board while taking any decision on the amendments to the Act.

If the drug regulators, they said, continued such action, the whole system would be destroyed and the World Health Organisation and other international agencies would declare Pakistan an unfavourable nation, which would deal a big blow to the national economy.

They asked the Punjab government to immediately withdraw the amendments to the Punjab Drug Act 2017 as these had pushed stakeholders to the wall and they were about to face huge financial losses.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 9^th, 2017.

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