At an interactive session during the just concluded Conference of the Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN) in Jos, Plateau State, Pharm. Wale Oladigbolu stood out as perhaps a lone ranger in his nonconformist posture. He did not hesitate to make his feelings known as this subject matter came to the front burner. Oladigbolu who chairs the Rivers State Chapter of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), cuts the image of an angry pharmaceutical health service provider as long as MAS is on the table; he is one who would not trade his reputation and sense of authority for anything in the world. As a result I made sure to probe deeper into his feelings as I accosted him after the session.
MAS, is the acronym for the process of confirming genuine pharmaceutical products or detecting fakes, known as the Mobile Authentication Service. As part of its statutory duty to effectively control drug sales and consumption in the country, the National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) had since issued a directive to pharmaceutical manufacturers as well as importers, distributors and marketers of anti-malarial and antibiotic drugs in Nigeria to implement the Mobile Authentication Service (MAS).
This service is one that is rendered by a few number of approved companies in the land, and it is a service whereby scratch-off labels are embedded on the packs of pharmaceuticals in order to stop imitation and put the power of product verification right in the hands of Nigerians. But early in the day this practice is already running into troubled waters with both practitioners and customers alike. Pharm. Oladigbolu for one certainly has a big axe to grind with MAS, and he does not mince words.
Now, why would some professional pharmacists not tolerate customers scratching the pack in their premises? So much controversy lately has been brewing regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of MAS, which is supposed to make transaction and medicament authentication really easy. But of late, various issues which speak against the efficacy of this mobile coded method of authentication have been making the rounds; it has caused a lot of misgivings – tending to acrimony between pharmacists and customers.
Pharm. Oladigbolu expects that “before any customer attempts to come into a pharmacy premises at all, it means there must have been a measure of trust on the side of the intending customer. He feels they must have believed that they are coming to get some particular genuine products from such facilities”, and so the question arises: does scratching the pack in their presence before leaving the store connote a lack of trust in a superintendent pharmacist – who is a qualified and licensed professional? According to Oladigbolu MAS is in place just “because the system has collapsed and failed; NAFDAC and other authorised agencies responsible for drug regulation and control have failed in their duty to put things right – in plugging all the loopholes”… that criminally minded people would love to exploit. To Pharm. Oladigbolu therefore, the coming into existence of MAS is simply an aberration!
He raises the question: “Suppose a product has been found to be authentic through passing this simple scratch test, does it really prove anything?” He thinks rather, a product passing the scratch test is not enough in that the same could become “inappropriate for consumption by reason of storage, or expiration”, yet it has been found to be authentic through passing the MAS test!
“I just find it difficult to reconcile when you consider the authority of the pharmacist, the validity of their premises, and then a customer wants to still prove the authenticity of the product found in my premises.” To professionals who reason like Oladigbolu, this might slightly be seen as a slight on them; it perhaps shows a lack of trust in their persons as well as in their registered premises.
“And then from there you go to the wholesalers, finding out who they sold to and so on down the line…” he says. It is a fact that drugs can actually be traced right from the point of manufacture or entry down to the eventual consumer. But “it seems the agencies such as NAFDAC are merely interested in registering drugs and just collecting their fees and that is all,” Pharm. Oladigbolu laments. He thinks the MAS thing is a “useless venture”. Nobody is scratching these things, he says. He further asks: “how many times have you seen people buying these products with these indications on them, and scratching them to reveal anything; how many products are you going to have this authentication mark fixed on anyway?”
It seems that the problem is more than we actually presume on the surface, for Oladigbolu holds vehemently to his policy: “You just can’t come into my facility with the mindset to scratch for authenticity; such a customer by so doing is invariably questioning also the validity or legality of my services; I will not allow you to do it! You can as well go to the nearest pharmacy where they can permit you, I don’t mind” he says.
But opinions are rife that many at times these misgivings may just be born out of network failure on the part of Internet network providers. People have been known to observe where well authenticated products were claimed to be fakes, or said to have failed the authentication test by MAS. And sometimes a product that was said to have been returned as substandard was later passed as authentic by the same MAS test. And you would say – come on, what’s going on here? And this is really worrisome.
But Pharm. Oladigbolu thinks these are no isolated cases.
“Let me tell you, it has happened before.” Many at times people go to pharmacies to purchase products and scratch them before the attendants and the test fails – perhaps due to network failure or wrongly typed codes, etc. At such instances Oladigbolu insists the customer just has to pay for the product. “If they like, let them come to meet me at the police station the following morning, and we will sort it out there. This is because I know the source of my products, and I believe in myself,” he says.
Morgan Nwanguma
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