Why Are German Pharmacies Running Out of Medication?

It is a curious story, told by ZDF (public TV in Germany, Channel Two).

So you have to lead off and ask.....just what drugs are in short supply? Cancer drugs, asthma inhalers, high blood pressure drugs, lower cholesterol pills, psychotropic drugs, and antibiotics.

It's a situation which has only popped up in the past two years....which ought to beg questions on the supply chain and why these shortages exist.

At some point, this probably goes back to around ten years ago....a lot of these drugs were still being produced in Germany, and Europe.  Cost of manufacture?  It was on a continual upward trend.  So various drug companies thought about the issue and did the logical thing....they moved production out of Europe, and into India and China.

I know.....it really begs questions over these companies and the logic they used to save on manufacturing cost, and ensure profitability.

So people started to notice as the production business was firmly anchored in a non-European factory....purity and quality issues started to pop up, and occasionally....a stoppage would occur (maybe for days....maybe for weeks)...while problems were sorted out.

To have this large assortment of drugs in short supply?  This begs questions as well, and makes you wonder about continual quality issues, and why they can't be permanently resolved. 

Added to this mess, the company didn't have to sell an entire batch of the drug in Germany, or for that matter....in Europe.  They could say we made 200 pallets of x-drug this month, and Brazil/Canada/Japan offered a higher sales price....so more than half of the 200 pallets went to those three countries, and everyone else got a lessen distribution.

Forcing a fix to this?  Because the companies own the patent to the drugs....most governments are at a loss on repairing this unless you take a anti-capitalist approach and punish the companies in some fashion.....or you go and buy the company and push the production back into Europe itself.

My guess is that this problem will become a top ten issue in the next major German election.  But there's little to be done unless the government and went bought three or four companies, and ran them as state companies. 

The idea of our good friendly drug-dealers (you know, the cocaine crowd)....getting into production of legal drugs?  That's the thing I would wonder about.  If you had the formula, and could enter into a quality production capability (even in the jungles of Peru)....you could enter into the European market, and sell your drug easily to consumers....maybe at half the cost of the current drug empires. 

So that's the basic story on the medication 'mess'.  Affecting people currently?  You will see an occasional news mention about the cancer drugs in short supply, and the asthma inhaler folks having to wait a day or two while the pharmacy works to find a source for the inhaler.