Bahman Sabour, the head of the Pharmacists’ Association, says that the Iranian government purchases and sets prices for over 60% of the medicines produced by domestic pharmaceutical companies, and this is the main reason for the low quality of these drugs.
On Saturday, September 14, Sabour told Rokna news agency that “the majority of medicines are produced under fixed pricing.” For products without price regulation, “the producer sets the price based on the materials used and the production cycle costs.”
Sabour further added that patients compare domestically produced medicines to a dish missing its key ingredient, saying, “Domestic medicines meet the minimum standards, while foreign medicines are above the normal standard.”
Meanwhile, drug production in Iran is facing a crisis due to the lack of liquidity to purchase raw materials for manufacturing plants.
Following increased criticism of the critical situation regarding medicine, on August 9, Mohammad Jafar Ghaempanah, Executive Vice President and acting head of the Presidential Institution, announced that Massoud Pezeshkian had ordered the head of the Central Bank to resolve the liquidity issue for the supply of raw materials for pharmaceutical factories and the import of medicine.
Earlier in May, the regime’s president, Massoud Pezeshkian, who at the time was still a member of the Health and Medical Commission of the regime’s Majlids (Parliament), revealed that the government owed 6 trillion rials (nearly $1 billion) to pharmaceutical companies.
A month after Pezeshkian’s remarks, Mohammad Ali Bandpay, a member of the Health and Medical Commission’s presidium, warned that medicine had become a “crisis,” announcing that the number of scarce medicines had surpassed 200 types.
