KSA bans online sale of drugs

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority has banned the sale of any kind of drug over the Internet, while imposing stricter measures for organizing the import of drugs through transport carriers.
“The SFDA is making every possible effort to combat drug cheating by putting in place necessary legislation to prevent the entry of counterfeit medicines,” explained executive vice president of the drug sector at the FDA Ibrahim Juffali.
“We are instituting measures to tighten control over the supply of drugs, and prevent trading or marketing of adulterated or illegal medications online or elsewhere. The latest technology will also be adopted to detect such drugs and deal with them accordingly,” he said.
This technology allows inspectors to identify adulterated medications in less than 10 seconds, according to Juffali.
He said samples of medicines are taken for analysis to ensure safety, while all drug shipments to the Kingdom are verified to ensue they meet conditions and safety requirements. The FDA prevents storage of medicines by unlicensed warehouses. All warehouses are strictly monigtored.
According to Juffali, global reports indicate counterfeit medicines make up 50 percent of drugs marketed and sold on the Internet, prompting the FDA to coordinate with authorities to prevent and monitor the sale of drugs online.
Teams from the authority also conduct routine inspections at all drug retailers in the Kingdom, and pull random samples to verify they conform to specifications.
“During the past three years, inspections of 12,000 samples from 4,000 pharmacies revealed that the percentage of fake medications in the Kingdom are under 1 percent,” said Juffali.