Mexico’s president inaugurated a huge “super pharmacy” Friday in a bid to end the woes of patients throughout the country who are often told they need a specific medicine — but the hospital in question doesn’t have it.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.
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The pharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can’t get needed medications at a local hospital, the patient, the patient’s doctor or the pharmacist would be able to call up the warehouse and get it delivered from the huge 40,000 square meter (430,000 square foot) Mexico City warehouse.
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The question is whether Mexico can overcome its history of being bad at regulating the pharmaceutical industry, bad at buying medicines, bad at storing them, and bad at distributing them. Extreme centralization also hasn’t helped Mexico much in the past in many areas.
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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.
Desperate parents blocked traffic at the Mexico City airport last year, holding up a banner reading: “There isn’t any chemotherapy, treatment or medicines, have some empathy and sensitivity.”
But in Mexico, that has led to contamination of the vials, triggering outbreaks of injection-induced meningitis in two Mexican states that have killed dozens of people — including some Americans who sought treatment at clinics in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.
The fake medicine trade is so common, and so lucrative in Mexico because patients or their relatives are often told by doctors to buy medications at private drug stores when they are unavailable at government hospitals.
Angry at what he claimed were inflated profits made by drug distributors and importers, the president simply cut the private companies out and decided the government should directly buy all medications.
Because the government did not have much infrastructure, contacts or experience in such a massive effort, López Obrador signed an agreement with the World Health Organization to help Mexico in purchasing.
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