I am a pensioner living in Durban North with my wife. I believe in the DA philosophy and have donated to the DA. I tried to arouse public opinion by writing a letter to The Mercury on this very subject but my letter was not published. I truly believe that the cost of medication has spiralled out of control because of greedy pharmaceuticals manufacturers and pharmacies who are making much more out if it than they would by an annual price increase. The manufacturer, along with the pharmacies, have and are, reducing the quantities per box or ml in a bottle then charging more for less. The government also scores from the higher medication prices because of the extra VAT that higher prices generate. There is no reason why any of them would want to change the status quo.
Parliament needs to work on a bill that would bring back affordable family size units of self-medication and more realistic quantities of script medication to the shelves of pharmacies. It’s even worse when lobbyists persuade the health minister that something is good to do for public health when clearly the minister is not taking the cost of the medication to the patient into consideration. One needs to reverse this pernicious trend.

For example, codeine cough mixture is, now by law, limited to 100ml bottles. Before, it used to be available in a convenient 250ml bottle size. Now who in the world gets rid of a bad cough in 2 ½ days? If one has a bad cough, one must now buy at least two or three of the smaller more expensive bottles of 100ml at the beginning of a cough or else go back to the pharmacist when sick and buy the second bottle or even a third bottle.

An example of a self-medication rip-off is the common antihistamine. One is limited to buying boxes that contain 30 tablets. If a husband and wife both need daily antihistamine because of allergy from living on the coast, or that that have a cat allergy, that family must buy two boxes of the more expensive product every month. What happened to the much cheaper per tablet family size box of 100 tablets?

Betagesic containing Ibuprofen is another rip-off where it used to be available in a box of 100 but not only available in the more expensive boxes of 20 tablets. How on earth can one say that was done for our own good when the manufacturer’s instructions say no more than 6 tablets in 24 hours and if problems persist for longer than 7 days, see a doctor. That’s 42 tablets one can safely take before one should see a doctor! Why must one now be forced to buy 3 boxes of the more expensive smaller tablet strips? But that is what one now has to do.

Decongestant is another self-medication rip-off. Only a couple of years ago, one used to be able to buy a convenient box of 48 tablets. Now, one has to buy either a box of Sinucon containing one strip of 20 tablets, not exceeding 5 tablets in one day. Another choice, when cost is taken into consideration, is to buy a box of Sinuclear, which contains one strip of 12 tablets, again, no more than 5 tablets in one day and comes with NO warning about how long one can continue to take the self-medication. What makes it even more infuriating is that Sinuclear uses the same box size that used to hold 24 tablets (two strips of 12 tablets)! If one queries the cost of a larger unavailable box size of say 48 tablets, we are told that it is the same price per tablet anyway when clearly we know that couldn’t be true because of the cost saving to supplier by bulk, family size buying.

The point is that it is too hard to swallow that the higher medication prices alone will deter a drug abuser or one that over self-medicates. One can buy any number of the more expensive smaller boxes or bottles of codeine without restriction. What we have, is a manufacturer, pharmacy and government conspiracy that artificially maintains high medication prices and I hope the DA can do something about it.

Sincerely,
Gerry Nelson, Durban North
ranelson@telkomsa.net