It is really matter of great concern that there are certain medical shops selling Schedule H1 drugs to people without asking for prescriptions. This practice needs to be curbed strictly by the concerned quarters as it is an open secret that youths today have started consuming certain medicines for intoxication without giving a thought on the fact that these could be more dangerous than the narcotics and other means of the intoxication including the liquor.
Recent reports also indicate that several habitual offenders shift their operations to rural belts where monitoring remains comparatively weak. This emerging trend underscores the urgent need for district-level surveillance teams, periodic inspections, and strict licence reviews to prevent chemists from exploiting regulatory gaps and endangering vulnerable youth through unchecked drug sales.
In this context, a Medical Shop has been sealed in Madana area of Poonch District after the police and the Drug Control Authorities reportedly found that the aforesaid chemist was selling the Schedule H1 drugs to local youth without valid prescriptions. It was also found that the aforementioned chemist was not maintaining mandatory computerized sale records, as required under the Drugs & Cosmetics Act and related Drug Control regulations.
There are hundreds of chemist shops in J&K and the stringent action taken by the police and other agencies against the sale and supply of narcotics material, the pressure has been shifted on these medical shops as persons especially youth habitual of substance abuse are using certain drugs for intoxication and they are even ready to pay more for satiating their desire to go for substance abuse.
This allurement of extra money often swayed the medical shop owners to breach rules and provide the drugs to addicts, which otherwise couldn’t be sold without prescriptions of medical consultants. One such product is Pregabalin, which is a highly sedative drug and is frequently misused by vulnerable youth, posing serious risk to public health and safety.
As people with flickering mindset could be convinced to breach the rules in such cases it becomes necessary that proper monitoring should be kept and above all the medical shop owners and their staff should be educated on the issue through comprehensive campaigns, so that drug addicts stop getting such drugs with chemical compositions providing comparable results as they get from narcotics substances.
There is dire need that CCTV cameras should be installed in all chemist shops with the recordings available for monitoring by the authorities for a long time. The issue is of immense importance and therefore all measures should be taken to ensure that not even a single pill of a Schedule H drug reaches to the drug addicts as this can kill the purpose of intensifying the action against drug menace and substance abuse in J&K, which is going on full throttle these days.
