Homoeopathy shops raided in Odisha

Berhampur: Raids were conducted in homoeopathy medicine shops jointly by the Drug and Excise officials in Ganjam district to crackdown on illegal sale of medicines with high alcoholic content, official sources said on Friday.

"We raided at least two shops and collected samples of five medicines yesterday to test them for alcoholic content. We sent these samples to a laboratory at Ghaziabad for testing,” Drug Inspector (Berhampur), Sundarshan Biswal said. The raids were conducted after several empty homoeopathy medicine bottles were found scattered near Berhampur Municipal Corporation (BMC) building, the sources said. Homoeopathy drugs with high content of alcohol were suspected to be used as a substitute for liquor by some people, the sources said. Moreover, these drugs were cheaper than liquor, the sources said. The Drug Inspector, however, said they did not find the particular drug from any of these two shops during the raids. He said the raids would continue in other shops of the town. Most of the shops downed their shutters after the raids began, he said. “We will write to the companies of these particular brands to know the distributors of the medicine in the state,” Biswal said. The manufacturing centres of these particular brand medicines are in Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, he said. As per norms, shop owners should maintain a register about the medicines which contains over 12 percent alcohol. But many shop owners do not follow the rule, officials said. Moreover, several shops in the town sell homoeopathy medicines without proper prescriptions and without license, they said.