WHO names Kenya as safe haven for fake drug cartels

Kenya is a safe haven for a cartel that has choked the domestic market with counterfeit and untested medicine smuggled through informal channels, the World Health Organisation has said, warning that the country could incur huge costs in mitigating the side effects of the drugs.

The value of both genuine and fake medicines sold illegally to unsuspecting consumers is roughly Sh10.4 billion ($130 million) annually, says the organisation in its October newsletter.

The value includes drugs donated by international agencies, those stolen from hospitals and expired or fake ones made by backstreet firms and routinely smuggled in through East Africa’s porous borders.

The cartel — believed to include senior Health ministry officials— runs a complex web of informal trade, spanning the five East African Community countries, DR Congo and Southern Sudan. The rogue merchants, who devise elaborate schemes to disguise their activities, are aggressive and smart, according to WHO, which blames the menace on weaknesses in border controls. “They (cartel) establish fictitious front companies and use falsified documents to exploit weaknesses in border control as governments reduce border inspections to encourage free trade,” WHO says in the Newsletter.

The concern over drugs safety comes just weeks after local pharmaceutical producers complained of frequent theft of narcotics in their premises by what they termed “ well co-ordinated cartels.” Drug companies are allowed to buy narcotics which they use as raw materials in making medicines under the strict watch of regulators.

“This has become a well co-ordinated business because in most cases, we realise that up to five pharmaceutical companies have been raided and all their narcotics stolen in one night without any clue for arrests,” said a manager at one of the local pharmaceutical firms, which cannot be named for security reasons.

The raids have sparked widespread fears over the authenticity of drugs sold over the counters and hospitals with the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB), the government agency that regulates the sale of medicines, saying yesterday it had issued strict cross-border trade rules to tighten the noose on the cartels.

The board’s head of pharmacovigilance department, which tracks the movement of drugs, Dr Jayesh Pandit, said the recent designation and gazettement of all entry and exit points for drugs would push the cartels out of business.

“Our instruction to all regulatory and law enforcement agencies in the region is that any drug that is not inspected and cleared at the designated points should be confiscated immediately,” he said, adding that the international community had taken long in stamping out the cartels because of “too much” focus on infringement of intellectual property rights of big pharma, loss of monopoly or financial losses.

“Unfortunately, lesser attention is given to the number of lives lost, number of severe drug reactions experienced and the morbidity associated with the murderous trade of counterfeiting,” said Dr Pandit

Medical Services minister Anyang’ Nyong’o said fake and expired drugs posed a threat to health services’ medicine vaults due to increased dumping.

“We don’t have a donation policy, making it easy for some donor agencies that come here in the guise of helping the poor to dump expired or counterfeited drugs that we cannot detect because instructions are always in languages other than English,” said Prof Nyong’o.