Drug inspection: Smuggled, fake Viagra, painkillers seized in raid

Pharmaceutical company knew but no information was shared: FIA spokesman.

KARACHI: In a raid conducted under suspect circumstances, men from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) broke into four medical stores and two godowns without drug inspectors from the health department on Saturday.

The stores are located in Godhra, New Karachi in a neighbourhood lined with them. In the afternoon, a hue and cry broke out among shopkeepers and residents after the FIA men chucked boxes of medication into the street, making it impossible to gauge quantity. When the neighbourhood watch arrived, they calmed the crowd down and helped the FIA men, who were by that time joined by health department drug inspectors. The inspectors had initially been supposed to raid the warehouses with the FIA officials. Judicial magistrate Ahsan A Malik of Karachi Central was present.

For its part, the FIA said it had received several complaints from American pharmaceutical company Pfizer. However, Pfizer spokesman Ahmer Ashraf told The Express Tribune that he had no knowledge of the raid nor had any intelligence been provided by the company which may have assisted in one.

Thousands of boxes of unregistered, smuggled and fake medicines were found. Part of the team was FIA Inspector, Crime Circle, Salman Waheed, who said he could not give the exact amount of medicines recovered or their total worth.

In one instance, the officers made their way through a narrow tunnelled warehouse. They broke into three connected rooms with shelves of medicines nearly reaching the 30-foot-high ceiling. The warehouse was so closely packed that the officials could only pass through the form of a single file. The medicine they recovered was estimated to be worth tens of millions of rupees.

About one per cent of the medicines seized are believed to be fake and others are unregistered, smuggled or in misleading packaging, said Divisional Drug Inspector Mohammad Idrees Shaikh. For example, some homeopathic medication is repackaged and sold as allopathic or in other instances a product such as Polyfax, “which sell likes channas (chickpeas)” is made with different ingredients and packaged under the deceptive name of ‘Polyvax’.

A large quantity of medicines were discovered to have been smuggled from India. Medication was found, for example, from the Indian Combitic Global. Other medication was smuggled from Iran and China.

Six men were taken into custody after an initial three, but the officials strangely enough were only willing to name two of them, who happened to be from a particular minority. An FIR had not been registered till the filing of this report.

An earlier raid in September had led to the discovery of similar stashes of pharmaceuticals. The same officials were behind Saturday’s raid. They included the health department’s drug inspector for district central, Syed Adnan Rizvi. He said that the most common drugs recovered include painkiller Voren and Viagra. The FIA inspector Waheed pointed out that the fakes and misleading packaging takes advantage of people who cannot read. “Paracetamol, for example, is a popular painkiller but the uneducated just see a tiger on the cover and think it is the real thing,” he said.

The team also found surgical tape, plaster, vitamins, syringes, cotton wool and folic acid tablets.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2010.