Officials reluctant to probe drug case
Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
City health officials seemed reluctant to launch an investigation in the face of allegations that subsidized and donated medicines are finding their way onto the black market across the capital.
City Health Agency spokeswoman Evy Zelfino said that health officials had already dispatched a team to look into the charges.
"Our inquiry has found no violations -- either in any public health centers, or pharmaceutical storage facilities here," she told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
So far, however, the agency has only inspected one public health center in Tanah Abang, along with a Central Jakarta pharmaceutical storage facility.
Therefore, it has yet to investigate the other 279 health centers and five pharmaceutical storage sites across the city.
"We had examined monthly reports in the Tanah Abang health center, and in the Central Jakarta pharmaceutical storage facility -- we had also seen a medicine supply there," Evy said.
In regulating the distribution of medicine around the city, the agency relies only on the reports, which outline rules about the transfer of medicines between health posts and pharmaceutical storage.
The health agency is responsible for the distribution of the medicines as an arm of the Ministry of Health.
The medicines are first sent to a provincial pharmaceutical warehouse for storage, before being delivered to the five pharmaceutical storage sites in each of the five mayoralties here. Finally, from there the medicines are sent to all public health centers across Jakarta.
Each public health center can order a different amount of medicine each month, depending on its needs.
When asked about the possible manipulation of the reports, Evy said, "It might have been done by individuals. Who can guarantee the truth of the report? But we haven't talked about it any further."
She insisted that there was no manipulation of the subsidized and donated medicines here, particularly those for flood victims.
However, Evy confirmed that some of the medicines found by the Indonesian Health Consumers Empowerment Foundation had been subsidized, when they should have been available only in public health centers.
"We did visit the foundation and saw some subsidized and donated medicine, but we didn't know how it happened," she said, suggesting that it might have been connected to a theft from a pharmaceutical warehouse in Sukabumi, West Java.
The foundation revealed on Monday its survey findings that half of the subsidized and donated medicine for low-income people was sold on the black market here.
The survey also found that several public health centers had charged their patients more than the official fee of Rp 2,000 for both medicine and medical treatment per each visit as a result of the overall increase in medicine prices.
City Bylaws No. 3/1999 and No. 9/2000 on tariffs stipulate that no patient at a health center must pay more than Rp 2,000 for basic medical treatment, including medicine. The tariff is valid for medical treatment in the morning.
Afternoon patients must pay no more than Rp 5,000.
Evy confirmed that the bylaw is presently valid. When the Post asked her about the violation of the tariff, she replied,"I don't know about that -- we have not yet received the information," refusing to comment further.