Discovery of 20 Million 'Illegal' Medicines in Tehran

The head of the capital's police announced on Tuesday the discovery of a drug warehouse containing 20 million medicines, including rare and special drugs. Abbasali Mohammadian stated: "Criminals were falsifying electronic prescriptions and registering the details of healthy individuals as patients to remove rare and necessary drugs from the legal supply chain and sell them in virtual black markets." According to this police official, a large volume of rare and unavailable medicines that met the needs of the country's patients has been discovered and confiscated. This discovery comes at a time when patients in Iran are facing many problems due to the shortage and high prices of medicines, with the issue of drug and medical equipment shortages having made headlines multiple times in recent months. Accordingly, on May 3, the head of the board of directors of human pharmaceutical industries reported a "decrease in the inventory of raw pharmaceutical materials" and an "exponential increase" in drug shortages expected in June and July. The head of the Health Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly also stated that the commission has written a letter to Ebrahim Raisi regarding the drug shortage issue. In this letter, published on May 10, it was noted that the inventory of raw pharmaceutical materials at the level of factories and pharmaceutical production companies in the country is at its "lowest level." Hossein Ali Shahriari threatened the government in this letter with sending a report to Ali Khamenei, stating that the Ministry of Health had indicated a need for at least 105 trillion tomans, while the government submitted a budget of 69 trillion tomans to the parliament. Earlier in May, Bahram Einollahi, the Minister of Health, claimed that the number of medicines in shortage had decreased from 400 to 70 items and said that drug reserves had reached seventy percent. However, the head of the Health Commission of the parliament described the country's strategic drug reserves as "very low." Increasing concerns about the rising prices of basic goods have emerged alongside the growing whispers of eliminating "supportive currency." One cannot get sick; there are no medicines or they are too expensive. The drug crisis for patients suffering from thalassemia; Iranian medicines do not work on patients. Concerns about serious drug shortages in Iran; a pharmacist told Voice of America: "Even the provision of simple medicines has faced problems." The Food and Drug Organization denied the shortage of infant formula and its sale with national ID numbers. The uncertainty of basic goods in customs raises the possibility of shortages in the market. The intensification of the drug crisis in Iran; a government official confirmed: the treatment of some diseases has become "billion-dollar!"