Andy Gray
One of the dividends of the new democratic dispensation has been the opportunity to take a fresh look at all the laws affecting pharmacy. Instead of harbouring a musty green leather volume (or a bright green plastic one for those more recently qualified) on a top shelf, we have had to become au fait with Bills and Amendment Acts, to really work with and shape our own laws. We have also discovered how frustratingly slow the process can be. When the National Drug Policy was published in 1996, many pharmacists welcomed the commitment contained therein to the use of generic medicines and the practice of generic substitution. Surely this government would not be deflected, as had others in the past. Few of us would have predicted that we would be counting down to the millenium and still not have this practice entrenched in law. The core issue in the legal challenge to the Amendment Act is that of parallel importation. Given the recent decision of the Executive Board of the World Health Organisation to approve the Revised Drug Strategy, surely it is time for the Government to reach some kind of out-of-court settlement with those who brought the court action against implementing Act 90 of 1997. Even more interestingly, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr intends introducing a Bill in the US Congress which would make it illegal for federal funds to be used to counter any African attempts to legislate for improved access to essential drugs by such mechanisms as parallel importation, compulsory licensing or generic substitution. It’s time to sort out any remaining legal niceties, to fix not frustrate, and to separate the more controversial aspects from the simply logical. We have all substituted medicines, in the private but especially in the public sectors, but it’s time to do it legally.
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