Islamabad: An organised gang is producing and supplying spurious and counterfeit medicines of multinational as well as local pharmaceutical companies to different cities of Pakistan.
Health officials said adding that counterfeit medicines, including important antibiotics, painkillers, anti-psychotic drugs and other important medicines for saving lives, being supplied to smaller cities and towns from different areas of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, seriously threatening lives.
“Health officials in Lahore yesterday raided a printing press in the Mori Gate where packing material of different life-saving drugs being printed illegally.
This printing press came to the knowledge of health officials after a huge consignment of spurious and counterfeit medicines was apprehended by officials in Hyderabad district,” an official in the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) told Private News on Sunday.
The illegally-printed packing material of life-saving drugs being supplied to unauthorised factories. In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the gangs behind this organised crime producing spurious and counterfeit medicines. And then supplying them to areas where people have little knowledge of genuine and counterfeit products, they confirmed.
Following the raid on the printing press and arrest of culprits printing illegal packing material for life-saving drugs.
A country-wide investigation has been launched to detect the criminals behind producing spurious and counterfeit medicines,
DRAP officials said adding that initially it has come to their knowledge that the racket of spurious and counterfeit medicines has spread to all the four provinces of Pakistan.