He said, “In Lebanon, there are more than thirty thousand reported cases of cancer, in addition to hundreds of thousands of people with heart disease, pressure diseases, and other chronic and incurable diseases,” stressing that “medicine is not a luxury item or a luxury, but rather an urgent and basic need for treatment.” The patient who, if he misses her, will lead to his inevitable death.”
He believed that “storing medicine and before that refraining from importing or rationing it, and controlling its prices by the exclusive agencies for import, in light of the inability of local factories that produce regarding ten percent of the market’s need, and these products are in turn exposed to storage in order to obtain additional illegal profits.”
He added, “All of this led to the loss of these medicines from the shelves of pharmacies, the closure of a number of them, and the emigration of their owners abroad, all of which leads to a kind of systematic, albeit unintentional, killing of patients with incurable and chronic diseases and cancer patients.”
And he stressed that “the issue of medicine in Lebanon, importing, manufacturing and pricing, is much more dangerous than leaving it in the hands of some importers, warehouse owners and smuggling gangs, leaving and entering Lebanese territory.”
He concluded by calling on the Ministry of Health, the guarantor bodies, the Syndicate of Pharmacists, the Syndicate of Doctors in Beirut and Tripoli, and the Syndicate of Drug Importers to “establish a crisis cell with the General Labor Union to start developing a comprehensive national plan that will put a final end to this national tragedy before it becomes intractable.”
