In front of the old mansion that serves as a pharmacy in Camajuaní, a crowd of neighbors gathered this Friday. As if by magic, the shelves of the establishment were filled with medicines that have not been seen for months. The abundance generated suspicion. Where did all these drugs come from?
The explanation is simple and an employee informs the population: “They are about to expire.” The scene is repeated in nearby towns such as Taguayabón and in the neighboring municipalities of Remedios and Santa Clara. The indignation of those who queue, too.
Why did the Public Health authorities wait so long to get the drugs out? In what warehouse were they kept and why are they about to spoil? Alarmed at having to process and sell the drugs, apothecaries in the province are trying to get them available to customers as quickly as possible.
Outside the pharmacies, people roar their disagreement. “Bad administration, like everything,” says Ramón, one of the neighbors, “I don’t understand how before there was nothing and now they supplied in record time: they had it stored.”
Miguel, another client, suspects that the products come from the National Warehouse of the State Reserve, the establishment where the Government keeps medicines when the shortage is more serious. “I asked the employees,” he says, “and they don’t even know where they came from. What matters to them is to sell it before it expires.”
“But the great disappeared continue: I have never again bought ketotifen or montelukast, or any other antihistamine”
“They should lower the price,” argues another client, who acknowledges that Cubans are capable of consuming any medicine, even expired, as long as it doesn’t look “bad”, have a strange color or are visibly decomposed.
“Yesterday my sister-in-law told me that they would sell the medicines,” says Yudit. “Today I got up early to see if I had enough paracetamol, loratadine, diazepam and chlordiazepoxide. But it was no use: I only got some paracetamol tablets at 3.40 pesos and loratadine, which they sold me at 8.60”.
The situation is not unique to Villa Clara, as expected. Also in Sancti Spíritus and Havana unexpected “alarms” sound and the queue forms in front of the pharmacy.
“It’s not that they are expired, but they are about to expire,” Juan, a man from Sancti Spiritus who suffers from various allergies, tells this newspaper. “But the great missing continues: I have never bought ketotifen or montelukast again, or any other antihistamine.”
Anxious, with sweaty hands and a look that jumps from one point to another, María Eugenia, a 65-year-old from Havana, has spent several months without obtaining the medications that her doctor has prescribed against the permanent agitation that she has had for a few years. become a widow and her son emigrate leaving her alone on the Island.
“I can’t go without chlordiazepoxide,” he clarifies to 14ymedio. “In the pharmacy that I have to buy, there are several of us who are in the same: with our nerves shot and without the medicine that we need so much.”
Frustration and necessity led María Eugenia to pay 350 pesos on the black market for 20 tablets of chlordiazepoxide.
Recently, María Eugenia stood in line at midnight in front of the pharmacy in the municipality of Centro Habana where she must buy the drugs she urgently needs. “They announced that they were going to take out several pills for the nerves and also for people who have a heart disease. But it was a lie.”
When dawn began, “that seemed like the queue of the crazy, because we were all with tremendous anxiety that you could see on our faces,” he acknowledges. “But when they opened the pharmacy, the employees told us that they had not supplied any of the medicines that they had told us.”
Frustration and necessity led María Eugenia to pay 350 pesos on the black market for 20 tablets of chlordiazepoxide. “They were domestically produced pills, so they were obviously stolen from a store or a pharmacy,” she speculates. The woman noted that the expiration date on the packaging was October 2022.
“I’m going to take them the same way because I have no other option,” he says. “I can’t afford to wait to find other pills that aren’t about to expire because I don’t function without this medicine. I have to go out every day knowing that I have several pills in my bag. Just knowing that I have them calms my anxiety.”
The option of many Cubans has been to anticipate any of these eventualities: “You have to bother the doctor and ask for prescriptions every month: you never know when the medicines are going to arrive and you have to be prepared.”
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