Cabinet clears draft law: No sale of antibiotics without prescription

Staff Reporter :
Imposing restriction on selling antibiotic drugs in the medicine stores, the Cabinet on Monday gave its final approval to the draft of ‘Drugs and Cosmetics Act 2023’.
Once the draft law is endorsed in the Parliament, the sale of antibiotic drugs without prescription from a registered doctor would be banned. It would mandatory to have a prescription of the registered physician to sell the antibiotic medicine which is claimed to hazardous for health.
The approval was given in the weekly Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at her Tejgaon office in Dhaka.
The meeting also approved the draft of Copyright Act, 2023 and a proposal of the Local Government Division (LGD) to observe January 16 as National Local Government Day.
While briefing reporters at the Secretariat after the meeting, Cabinet Secretary Md Mahbub Hossain said, “As per the draft law, the antibiotic drugs can’t be sold without the prescription of any registered doctor and it’ll be a punishable offence.”
“If the antibiotic drug is sold without the prescription, the shoppers will be fined Tk 20,000,” he said, adding that the matters of monitoring and controlling the use of antibiotics were included in the proposed law as prevention of the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has now emerged as a big challenge.
He said now there are two drug laws, which are Drugs Act 1940 and Drugs (Control) Ordinance 1982. But the two laws focused only on drug issues, not cosmetics.
“In the proposed law, the cosmetics issue has been included,” said Mahbub Hossain.
In the proposed law, some 30 types of offences were cited and the maximum punishment would be life-term imprisonment for several offences like production of fake and adulterated drugs as well as creating artificial crisis of drugs, he said.
Some new issues including development of drugs, vaccines and medical devices were incorporated in the draft law, he said, adding that the WHO guidelines will have to be followed in case of drug issue.
Mahbub said the government will fix the prices of some drug items as per the draft law.
The meeting also gave the final nod to the draft of the Copyright Act, 2023 keeping punitive provisions to check piracy.