Finance ministry mulls law amendment to increase morphine supplies.

NEW DELHI: The finance ministry is examining changes in the law to increase supply of morphine after Congress President and National Advisory Council chairperson Sonia Gandhi raised the issue of acute shortage of the cancer and HIV pain reliever.

India is the world's largest producer of opium from which cancer & HIV pain reliever morphine in made, yet patients struggle to get access to drug because of legal and bureaucratic issues.

Finance minister P Chidambaram directed his officials to look at changes in law to empower the centre to frame rules for not just manufacture but also transport and marketing of such essential narcotic drugs in the country.

Cultivation of opium is in the concurrent list, giving both the centre and states power to frame laws.

"There are several issues affecting supply of morphine...We are looking at changes in the law to ensure that these issues would be addressed," said a ministry official.

The finance ministry will look to make changes to the Narcotic Drugs & Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985 to reduce administrative bottlenecks to production of opium.

India is the supplier of opium to world but its consumption is one of the lowest at 0.9 milligram. Austria is the largest consumer of morphine in the world at 122 mg. Every year nearly 6 lakh people die of cancer in India.

Price differential between morphine and the next cheapest painkiller is about 100 times.

The centre makes rules for manufacture of morphine while state are responsible for sale, purchase, consumption, transport and inter-state import and export.

Cumbersome rules and requirement of multiple licences even within a state for different activities has discouraged private sector to foray into manufacture of this low cost sedative. The centre had framed model regulations in 1998 for states but only 14 states have implemented it so far and that too after making changes, complicating further already complex framework.

A number of civil society organisations had even filed a Public Interest Litigation in 2007 pleading for access of morphine to patients.

The Supreme Court had in August this year warned the states that their chief secretaries would have to appear before it if they failed to comply with its directives to ensure easily availability of the painkiller.

"We want the Parliament to pass an enactment so that rules for these medicines will be prescribed by the centre," said M R Rajagopal, chairman, Pallium India, a civil society organisation that has been championing the cause.

However, Rajagopal pointed that apart from availability of the drug, paucity of medical personnel trained to administer morphine is also an issue.
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Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com