Drug shortage uncovers large fraud in over 100 pharmacies

MADRID -- A sudden shortage of medication for treating cancer or against rejection in transplants, and treatments against leukaemia and epilepsy, has uncovered an illegal sales scheme by pharmacists all over the country. The police have been investigating over one hundred pharmacies in 14 autonomous regions for a year, centering it on the fact that several expensive medicines, provided by the government and among the most expensive, were being removed from the official, legal circuit, and prescribed in the normal way by doctors. The medicines were being bought by distribution companies at prices well below the norm and then sold on to companies or individuals abroad, where they obtained up to three times the cost in Spain. The illegality lies simply in the fact that pharmacies are not allowed to sell any medication to anyone other than patients, and most of it under prescription. The Spanish pharmacists' organization says the case is 'mostly residual' and it had to "defend the other 99% of our members," according to the President of the College of Pharmacists of Zaragoza, where the scam was first detected. There are some 22,000 chemists (farmacias) in Spain, and by no means are they all implicated in this fraudulent practice. Chemists and/or companies abroad involved include several in Germany, Holland and the UK, among others.