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“Buy real medicines here, at a huge discount! Free shipping included!” shout the taglines of medical e-commerce sites.
A quick Google search brings up a plethora of choices for any customer looking for a deal on popular medicines.
But buying medicines should not quite be like picking up clothes or a cellphone at the click of a mouse, so feels the All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD). As a result, over eight and a half lakh chemists all through the country will go on a strike on Wednesday (October 14th) to protest the sale of drugs online.
The chemist association insists, the health of the consumer, the fear of counterfeit drugs proliferating in the market is their only concern, but in reality it is a battle for the Rs 83,000-crore annual retail drugs business that the brick and mortar stores don’t want to give up without a fight.
The online websites are not following the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and there should be some end to this. If our protests are not heard, we will go on an indefinite strike in a month’s time.
— JS Shinde, President, All Indian Organisation of Chemists and Druggists
The Online Ache
India’s online retail market is expected to boom to $75 billion by the year 2020, according to an estimate by Google India. From fashion to furniture, the big boys of India’s online market, Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal can sell anything buy-able except medicines because of the ambiguity in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act.
Chemists across the country are threatened by the presence and convenience of sites and apps which are delivering much cheaper drugs by striking-off the high distribution margins.
According to ASSOCHAM, the drug industry in India could more than triple to Rs 3,00,000 crores in another five years – though currently the online chemists don’t have much of a share, they are growing rapidly and giving stiff competition.
AIOCD believes the biggest danger in e-pharmacies is the sale of prescription drugs, like sleeping pills, to anyone and everyone who can access the internet and order these medicines. So are we opening the door to drug abuse and irrational use of drugs by allowing medicines to be sold on web portals?
The Law Needs to Catch Up
Recently, Maharashtra FDA raided 27 online pharmacies and seized drugs worth crores.
Earlier in May, an FIR was filed against the CEO of Snapdeal for facilitating the sale of prescription drugs online. The product in question was a generic version of Viagra. The company argued on the lines that is it not a seller only an aggregator.
The Drugs and Cosmetics Act requires the seller (and not aggregator) to have a wholesale or retail licence for selling prescription drugs. The big question then, if there is a quality issue with the drug, who will be responsible? The seller, the service provider or the innocent customer?
The potential and scope of e-pharma cannot be underestimated given the huge price benefits for patients. Most registered e-pharmacies like 1mg and Zigy.com, say, they do not allow any orders of sleeping pills, abortion pills or any Schedule X drugs to go through their platform. Furthermore, a team of 35 pharmacists scans every prescription they get to zero-down the risk of fraud.
Yet watertight regulations are needed to ensure that online platforms are not misused to harm customers. A bigger problem will be the lack of quality control and globally recognised standards in the pharma industry, for which India has earned some disrepute in recent times.
India could perhaps learn from the US experience in regulating online transactions, a subject keenly debated there, covering the role of players as diverse as Amazon and Uber. It is, of course, another matter that the online sale of dubious drugs precedes the arrival of online retail giants in the Indian e-commerce scene. About a decade ago, the drugs inspectorate in Tamil Nadu cracked down on the sale of Viagra and other psychiatric medicines.
The fact is that our drug laws are a sham, our FDA is woefully ill-equipped to handle any quality concerns. An improved ecosystem for both pharma and e-commerce will mean a win-win situation for all. Before that happens, let’s not shoot the messenger.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)