From Cameroon to Ivory Coast, Kenya to the DR Congo, traders in counterfeit drugs do a thriving business, sometimes at the cost of human lives.
"Street medication kills. The street is killing (safe) medication," declares a banner outside a pharmacy in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde, where the dangerous trade is rampant.
The market is saturated with counterfeit anti-malaria drugs, painkillers, antibiotics and even rehydration serum. No domain of the pharmaceutical industry is spared by illicit manufacturers and traffickers, according to reports gathered by AFP offices across Africa.
"That's powerful Diclofenac (an anti-inflammatory), which is the bestseller," says Blaise Djomo, a street vendor at Yaounde's central market. "And this is Viagra, which Cameroonians are really wild about."
About 100 traders like Djomo are set up under parasols in full view of everyone, their boxes heaped with medicines. Bubble-pack strips of pills are lined up in the wooden stalls.
People can even buy single pills at this market or even at some grocery stores. Vendors often mix fake medication with the real thing, which has either been legally acquired or stolen from supplies meant for hospitals and clinics.
At best, fake prescription drugs have no effect, acting like placebos, but at their worst, they are highly toxic. Either way they bring in vast sums of money for those behind the illicit traffic.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned at a conference last February that counterfeit drugs are a multi-billion dollar business accounting for 30 per cent of the pharmaceutical market in parts of Africa.
"Fraudulent medicines have proven to be harmful and at times fatal, as well as an increasingly lucrative area for organised criminal networks," the agency said in a press release.
"The supply routes are of two kinds. Alongside the small-scale smugglers, there are international criminal networks that undertake the supply of drugs from distant manufacturers in China and India," said Parfait Kouassi, who chaired the National Order of Pharmacists in Ivory Coast from 2005 to 2012.
"Most of these fake and adulterated drugs come from China and India, from where we import more than 50 per cent of the drugs we use in Nigeria. We don't import much drugs from the US," says Abubakar Jimoh, spokesman of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
"They no longer bring ... Illicit drugs in large containers but in small packs. They also change the labels of the drugs from outside the country to make them look original," Jimoh said.
