Warning to people selling illegal medications
Pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, and healthcare professionals have called on South Africa’s law enforcement to address the sale of unregistered weight loss medications.
The country’s Pharmaceutical Task Group (PTG) has warned that illegal medicines are increasingly sold through online platforms, including websites, social media, messaging services, wellness clinics, and other informal channels.
The group warned that this poses a significant risk to patients and places pressure on regulators, border and customs authorities, healthcare professionals, and the pharmaceutical industry.
The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) Market Control Senior Manager, Daphney Fafudi, said that people buying medicines from informal channels should consider what is in their medication.
“Patients often focus on whether a medicine works. But the real question is whether anyone knows what is in that product, whether it was manufactured correctly, whether it contains the correct ingredients, and whether it has been appropriately assessed and authorised,” said Fafudi.
Other in-demand categories being sold through informal markets are codeine-containing medicines, skin-lightening products, and performance-enhancing substances.
Fafudi said that the scale of this challenge is growing, with authorities reporting about 600 complaints regarding informal, illegitimate, and falsified products sold through unauthorised channels.
In addition, the Border Management Authority (BMA) reported intercepting over 1.7 million suspicious pharmaceutical-related products through border management protocols.
PTG Chairperson Stavros Nicolaou told Cape Talk that even registered medicines are being brought into the country illicitly by unknown sources or by sources that are non-compliant or lack quality-standard approvals.
“It’s a combination of things, and a growing problem which seems to have exacerbated with these GLP-1 weight loss products, which are understandably in high demand,” he said.
Nicolaou warned that the risk to patients and the public from these unregistered medicines obtained through informal channels is significant.
“Retatrutide is a medicine that is showing a lot of potential, but it is still in the experimental stage, so in other words, it’s still undergoing clinical trials to determine the quality, safety, and efficacy of the product,” he said.
Retatrutide is an experimental, once-weekly injectable medicine developed by Eli Lilly and Company to treat obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disorders.
“It’s absolutely astonishing, it’s almost egregious, I’d suggest, that before a medicine is proven or registered anywhere in the world, we are already seeing copies of that in our own country.”
Healthcare crime is an economic crime
Nicolaou has called on stakeholders and relevant authorities to address healthcare crime as more than just an issue relating to patient safety.
“Healthcare crime is both a patient-safety issue and an economic-crime issue. It harms patients, weakens trust in healthcare systems, undermines legitimate businesses, discourages investment and diverts economic activity away from the formal economy,” said Nicolaou.
He said that organised criminal networks exploit fragmented systems, and stronger cooperation between regulators, border and customs authorities, healthcare professionals, professional councils, government, and industry will be critical to addressing the problem.
“Criminal networks collaborate. Those protecting patients must collaborate, too,” he said.
When addressing the statistics on the counter-effects of medicines that are not yet registered, Nicolaou said that if left unaddressed, the problem will grow into a bigger one.
“When you start losing the integrity of your pharmaceutical regulatory and value chain, then you are in trouble as a country,” he said.
He said that clinical trials, particularly with retatrutide, cannot be rushed; otherwise, quality and safety outcomes may be jeopardised.
In his 40 years of industry experience, Nicolaou said that the entry of unregistered medicines and medicines still in clinical trials into the market is unprecedented.
He highlighted that a popular method for bringing unregistered products, such as certain peptides or counterfeit GLP-1 products, into the country is through its ports, disguised as other products, such as cat food or vitamins.
Nicolaou said that this method usually involves non-healthcare professionals and ends up in the possession of, for example, hairdressers, gym instructors, and beauty salons.
He said that no matter who sells unregistered medicine, be it a doctor, a pharmacy, or a member of the public, it remains illegal, and he has urged law enforcement to take action.
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