KABUL (SW) – A number of patients in the city of Kabul, complaining about the difference in the price of the same drugs in the pharmacies of this city, say that a number of drug sellers set the price of the drug arbitrarily.
They want the government, especially the officials of the National Food and Drug Administration, to control the price of the same drugs in the market.
A number of Kabul residents, whose patients are hospitalized in Malali and Jumhuriyet hospitals and who come to the pharmacies near these hospitals to get medicine, criticized the difference of several hundred afghanis in the price of the same medicine in the different pharmacies.
Sirajuddin, a resident of Qala Zaman Khan, said: “I have faced many of these problems. The prescription I bought at a pharmacy cost 500 afghanis and in the next pharmacy it is just 300. If we ask the first pharmacy why there is a difference, they will tell their reasons.”
Mohammad Alam, a resident of Makrorian, said: “A prescription in a pharmacy is 1,300 or 1,400 afghanis, but in some places it is not that much. Some have it, some don’t. People’s economy is very weak. People have to borrow and treat their patients. The price of medicine is almost half the difference.”
The patients want the officials of the caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate to control the price of the same drugs in the market.
Mohammad Ebrahim, a resident of Baghlan, who brought his wife to Kabul for treatment and is now hospitalized in Jumhuriyet Hospital, asked the relevant authorities to take care of this situation. “This situation needs to be addressed,” he said. “When we pick up the prescription, it’s very different outside the hospital. I think it cannot be controlled, everyone sells at whatever price they want. The patient has to buy the medicine, but this situation must be investigated.”
However, the officials of the Drug Dealers Union of Kabul accept the difference in the price of the same drugs in the pharmacies of the city, but they consider it time-consuming and difficult to control.
Haji Bawar, the head of the drug dealers’ union of Kabul city, said: “This is a problem, we tried hard, we asked the drug dealers many times to stop this work. There are thousands of pharmacies in the city of Kabul, it is a bit difficult to get ahead of this business. This is more related to the honesty of the sellers.”
However, officials at the National Food and Drug Administration of Afghanistan say that the process of monitoring the pharmacies in Kabul is ongoing and a certain percentage has been set for the pharmacies to sell drugs.
Javed Hajir, the spokesperson of this department, tells Salam Watandar: “Drug prices in Afghanistan are different because of different drug companies, but we still have control. We calculate according to the bill they got from the company or drug store. If their percentage is more than 15%, we will seal it. This is the only way.”
It should be mentioned that the residents of the capital, in addition to the difference in the prices of the same medicines in Kabul city, also complain about the low quality of the medicines. Based on the statistics provided by the National Food and Drug Administration of Afghanistan, 80% of the needed medicine is imported and the citizens spend one billion dollars to buy medicine every year.
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