An effective prescription

The Minister of State for SAFRON Shehryar Afridi has come under severe criticism for a statement that the tonnes of narcotics destroyed every year can actually be used to manufacture life-saving medicines. He made the statement while addressing a public gathering in the tribal Tirah valley, a key conduit for the nearly 10,000 tonnes of opiates that is grown and processed in Afghanistan before being smuggled into Pakistan. Afridi said that a factory would be set up to process the seized drugs into medicines. Despite the intense criticism, Afridi has stood by his stance.

A cursory view of the issue would lend you to weigh the criticism against Afridi as warranted. Given his stature of the minister, though, he at least deserves to be heard beyond the pseudointellectual cacophony from pleasure rooms. Opium — which contains opioids and is extracted from poppies, is actually one of the oldest forms of medicine and finds rich traditions of use in almost all pre-modern medicinal practices. Afridi is correct when saying that opioids do retain a place in modern medicine and a handful of countries and companies around the world create medicines using opioids as ingredients. It just requires the legal poppy-growing country and the pharmaceutics companies to be subject to extremely stringent controls.

The only place where Afridi’s argument requires some work is when he says that this raw material can be converted into medicines locally. The state of pharmaceuticals in Pakistan is not great. We lack the capabilities and the capacity to manufacture advanced medicines. Almost no antibiotics are manufactured locally. We even have to import critical vaccines such as those to combat polio. Perhaps this is where the minister can urge the government to focus on and make the country attractive for those firms which manufacture opium-based medicines.

Afridi has identified a true opportunity. The question is: do we have the will to stop the massive flow of narcotics by converting it into medicine?

Published in The Express Tribune, February 8^th, 2020.

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