Don't sell habit-forming drugs without prescription: Pharma body

Hyderabad: In the sensational mass family killings in Warangal, what caught everyone's attention was how could the prime accused get to buy 60 sleeping pills to execute his plan. These tablets cannot be sold by a medical shop without a doctor's prescription. The accused could easily get the sleeping pills highlighting flaws in the system. Reacting to this incident, the Telangana Chemists and Druggists Association has alerted its 25,000 members running medical shops across the state and told them not to sell habit forming drugs without a valid doctor's prescription.

The Association general secretary J Satish Rao said that sleeping pills are not given across the counter in any medical shop. On behalf of the association, we give alerts every two months on this subject. The messages go from State unit to District units and from there to towns and villages.

" Nearly 25,000 medical shops are linked to our association and we make it a point not to violate rules. Once the Warangal incident came to our notice we immediately responded," Satish Rao stated. Commenting on this subject, Vadlamani Naresh, a senior consultant psychiatrist from Columbus Hospitals in Begumpet stated that sleeping pills are advised by doctors for not more than 5 to 7 days in general. He said that people try to trick medical shops by taking old prescription also to fetch these pills.

"Doctors prescription and date has to be looked at thoroughly. If the prescription is an old one, the shops should refuse selling such drugs. But, people who are in need of them try to go to several shops to get them in their area and they succeed in it. In countries like US, doctors' prescriptions are directly mailed to a shop near their residence and the patient has to go there to fetch them. The shopkeeper gives them exactly the same number of doses and not more than that," the doctor said.

Efforts to take a comment from Drug Control Authority of Telangana on this subject went in vain as senior officials neither took calls nor responded to messages.