Essential medicines in short supply

Greece is struggling with a serious drugs shortage as more than 400 essential medicines are unavailable, with patients and pharmacists struggling to cope, according to the Athens Pharmaceutical Association. 

“The shortages concern essential medicines such as antibiotics, antidiabetics, antiepileptics, anticoagulants, antidepressants etc,” the association said in a statement. 

“For the past month I have been searching pharmacies for a specific muscle relaxant that a patient needs to treat spasticity. The patient is bedridden after a serious accident and needs to receive chronic treatment for spasticity. The treatment requires eight injections and I have only been able to find one. What should I tell his mother now?” said the president of the Panhellenic Pharmaceutical Association, Apostolos Valtas, in comments to Kathimerini.

“It is a daily and unmanageable problem for pharmacies and patients who are forced to search from pharmacy to pharmacy for the preparation prescribed by their doctor, or even to discontinue treatment until they find their medicine,” Valtas noted.

According to pharmacists, more than 200 drugs for almost the entire range of ailments are in a permanent state of shortage. 

The main reason cited by pharmacists for the drug shortages is the ever-increasing parallel exports. As Valtas pointed out, Greece has the lowest prices for medicines in the EU, which makes exporting them very profitable for drug distributors.

Tellingly, the profit of pharmacies for the preparations they distribute is set at 4.67% in Greece, which can be multiplied when distributors sell the preparations abroad. Based on the price at which the preparations are sold abroad, the profit for a very common collyrium eye wash reaches 189%, for a preparation for asthma it climbs to 106.7%, and 80% for a preparation for migraine and a staggering 277% for a muscle relaxant.

Seeing that the medicines they distribute to Greece end up in Germany, the United Kingdom or France, the pharmaceutical companies are reducing the quantities they sell on the Greek market.

To a lesser extent, the problem of shortages is also linked to problems in the production of medicines (shortages of raw materials) and the reduced quantities of medicines imported by the Pharmaceutical Research and Technology Company (IFET), which are unique medicines.