Astute, they impersonate patients and disappear drugs in short supply from pharmacies

Drug shortages create conditions that allow the astute to “play games” and hoard. Many pretending to be patients, buy expensive pharmaceuticals that are in great short supply.

A strange phenomenon of drug trafficking was identified and denounced by the Imathia-Pellas Pharmaceutical Cooperative (SFIP), where unknown persons visit various pharmacies pretending to be patients, on the one hand to remove drugs from the shelves of pharmacies in many prefectures by artificially increasing the shortage, and on the other hand to to sell these preparations at prices many times higher than their real value. The Group warned on April 19, 2024, its members to exercise maximum caution, especially in an isolated case of a fraudster impersonating the customer.

The drug Prolia disappeared again

According to the complaint, this person, going from pharmacy to pharmacy, “deforests” with a terrible method, expensive drugs, such as the monoclonal antibody denosumab which is marketed under the trade name Prolia and is in great shortage.

The president of the Panhellenic Pharmaceutical Association (PFS), Apostolos Valtas, had mentioned at the beginning of the month, speaking to iatropedia.gr, that he has asked the EOF to revoke the lifting of the ban on the parallel export of the specific preparation, as it has disappeared again from the pharmacy shelves.

It is an injectable drug, which costs €180 at retail, and is used to treat osteoporosis and bone loss caused by bone cancer treatments.

This unknown man buys these preparations from the pharmacist without a doctor’s prescription and normally pays for them out of his own pocket. He falsely claims, in fact, that he will then claim his money from his private insurance.

The Board of Directors of SFIP warns its members to ensure the reliability of their pharmacies and to defend the rights of patients. It also asks them to administer these preparations only on presentation of a medical prescription.

The announcement of the Pharmacists:

“Recently it has come to the attention of SFIP and other neighboring cooperatives, a coordinated effort by unknown people in the area to try to buy from the pharmacies preparations included in the list of very elliptical medicines (e.g. PROLIA) with the justification of private insurance coverage, with the result of making their already difficult procurement by companies and their homogeneous and proportionately equal distribution to pharmacies even more difficult.

So let’s ensure the reliability of our pharmacies and the maximum benefit of patients who really need them. It is recommended that they be given with a medical prescription.”

“We noticed that this is not a real patient”

The head of the Purchasing Department of SFIP, Agapi Akritidou, claims that it is customary for a patient to pay the full cost of his medicine or tests and then claim the money he paid from his private insurance by presenting the relevant receipts.

This patient, however, must have a doctor’s certificate available for the administration of the medicine.

“I noticed several requests from our member pharmacies for the drug Prolia with private insurance and I suspected that this was not a real patient, but someone astute who might be collecting packages. So I asked my president and manager to put out this announcement so that the pharmacists are suspicious,” he noted while speaking to f.daily.

He clarified that “the pharmacist cannot know that a certain person has visited several pharmacies and orders Prolia, so unfortunately we may have ‘lost’ several boxes that did not reach patients”.

Mrs. Akritidou points out, however, that – from her many years of experience in the pharmacy industry – she has found that these phenomena have significantly decreased after the implementation of measures to limit the phenomenon of parallel exports.

Source: iatropedia.gr