By Sola Ogundipe
The Minimac drug concept recently adopted by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration  and Control  (NAFDAC)  as a prelude to setting up of Mini – Manufacturing Drug Facilities in selected teaching and specialist hospitals in the country, has received hard knocks from the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN) Lagos State branch.

A statement signed by Pharm. Lanre Familusi, Chairman of the branch  noted that  “fundamentally,  the structure of the Mini – Manufacturing Drug Concept in hospitals is flawed because it amounts to an act of dubiety for anyone to give the impression that he can mobilize “3,000 pharmacists who have over 30 years of company experience” to come and work in Nigeria.

Faulting the concept, the statement said: “Which part of the world are these pharmacists going to come from? How are they suddenly going to become registrable to practice in Nigeria? This assertion borders on unrealisable Utopia and it can only exist in the realm of policy makers who do not reckon with the reality on the field.

Entitled “Mini-Manufacturing Drug Concept is Another Ruse” the document alleged that NAFDAC had sought to  utilise the concept to curb drug counterfeiting and drastically reduce drug prices as presently obtainable in community pharmacies.

Further, it noted:  “In today’s Nigeria, the number of active practitioners left to practice pharmacy is just a little over 5,000 as a result of the wretched output and a most uncondusive environment sustained by the new NAFDAC in the last one year.”

Faulting the claim by NAFDAC that the Mini – Manufacturing Drug Concept will curb drug counterfeiting  Familusi said it “remains a mere illusion as the quantum of clients who will benefit from the envisaged services of Mini – Manufacturing operators will be far less than 10 per cent of the Nigerian population.

“The reality is that access to hospitals like National Hospital, Abuja and even other tertiary health institutions is more of a privilege than a right.”

He said it had become imperative to draw  attention of stakeholders to the obvious aberration in  NAFDAC actively sourcing and entrenching would-be service providers in a terrain that it ought and would ultimately regulate.

“How objective and foolproof can regulatory procedures anchored by NAFDAC be, to its own creations in the light of the Nigerian factor?

What NAFDAC is proposing is almost tantamount to a regulatory agency like the EFCC going ahead to set up its own banks because some players in the banking sector are guilty of money laundering,” Familusi noted, saying “It is most unjustifiable for NAFDAC to give the impression that high prices of drugs which it intends to reduce are associated with Community Pharmacies when the World Health Organization (WHO) studies confirm albeit without ambiguity that prices of drugs in the plethora of unlawful pharmacies in private hospltsis is over 174 per cent of what is obtainable in private pharmacies and about 198 per cent above drug prices in public hospital pharmacies.

“This World Health Organization survey obviously confirms that drug prices in community pharmacies and public hospital pharmacies are about same level. The profiteers on drugs have always been the unlawful hospitals promoted by the colleagues of Dr. Paul Orhii who he deliberately exonerated at the Abuja launch.