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The move is designed to combat the menace of drug and
substance abuse in Nigeria, particularly amongst the teeming youth population.
NAFDAC director-general, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed
the new initiative at the commissioning of the narcotic drugs serialisation
pilot project in Lagos at the weekend.
She said, “We have realised our issue in Nigeria, and we are
ready to address it,” noting that “narcotics were chosen amongst other classes
of drugs to make sure that we do not have drug or substance abuse in Nigeria or
to mitigate it. This will be replicated for all other NAFDAC-regulated drug
products.”
Adeyeye recalled the ubiquitous misuse of Tramadol and
Codeine all over the country when she got to NAFDAC in 2017 with their adverse
effects on the mental health of young adults, children, and women that were
selling codeine or tramadol. “For the first six months of my tenure, I was
running after tramadol or codeine,” she asserted.
As a regulatory agency saddled with the responsibility of
ensuring the safety and quality of medicines, the DG stated that NAFDAC places
utmost importance on good distribution practices as a core mandate of the
agency is to ensure that the distribution of medical products along the
pharmaceutical supply chain reflects best global practices.
She however regretted that one of the greatest challenges
that stakeholders face today in the healthcare sector is occurrence of
substandard and falsified medicines, adding that in Nigeria, this problem is
further compounded by the chaotic drug distribution practices of unscrupulous
elements of society who do not place a premium on human lives.
“These are the sharp practices that the Traceability project
(Track and Trace) seeks to stop”, she maintained as she enthused that Track and
Trace (Traceability) is indeed a game changer, adding that with this
technology, medicines can now be tracked and traced right from the very source
of production, the manufacturing plant, to the end user, the patient.
Through the scanning device on an Android phone, the NAFDAC
boss said consumers can now verify the authenticity of the drug product they
consume and be assured of the quality of medicines. More importantly, she said
the track and trace technology is a veritable tool to be deployed in the event
of medication recalls.
“The commissioning event of the project is a crystallization
of a series of activities that the Agency embarked upon since May 2018, when we
attended the very first GS1 Africa healthcare conference in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia. This led to the development and formulation of the Traceability
Strategy Document, a five-year implementation roadmap for pharmaceutical
products that was launched by the then Honourable Minister for Health in
October 2020,” she said.