The Pharmacy Council has cautioned pharmaceutical wholesalers in the country against selling their products to unlicensed drug retailers and peddlers or risk sanctions.
According to the Council, the menace of drug peddling and van peddling were becoming a major healthcare challenge due to the difficulty in tracing the sources of some of the drugs, and medications peddled by these unlicensed individuals not captured by their data.
“The Pharmacy Council is having difficulty in dealing with illegal drug peddling and since retailers source their medicines from the wholesale, then they must help us to deal with the canker,” the council said.
The head of enforcement and intelligence gathering at the Pharmacy Council, Mr William Rottermen, issued the caution at an engagement with pharmaceutical wholesalers in the Southern Sector of the country held in Accra yesterday.
In all about 100 wholesalers participated in the meeting and were taken through the Health Professions Regulatory Act, Act 857, and under guidelines underpinning their operations.
Mr Rottermen said the need to engage the wholesalers had become necessary because the number of peddlers was becoming alarming.
He said the engagement was to ensure that where the wholesalers dealt directly with these peddlers they stop, and where there were leakage in their facilities which made it easier for some of their workers to illegally sell to them, those leakages were blocked.
He explained that pharmaceutical wholesalers were a category of professionals or service providers regulated by the Council, just as there were retailers and over the counter medicine sellers who were covered by their activities.
“We also regulate pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy assistants. However, recently or over time, you may have realised that there are young boys around carrying transparent plastics with medicines inside, carrying it in the sun selling to our mothers and traders around. We cannot guarantee the safety of these medicines,” he said.
Mr Rottermen said the dangerous aspect of their activities was that the medicines were always in the sun, and very difficult to even tell their expiry dates.
“The information we have is that probably it is the wholesalers that sell to them so we have gathered this wholesalers here today so that we will discuss with them how we can seal the leakage from their facilities,” he said.
He added that after the training, the council would team up with the police to arrest persons peddling these medicines.
Mr Rottermen further explained that the Health Professional Regulatory Act made it an offence to carry medicines when not authorised, adding that “it is also an offence to move about with medicines for sale.”
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
