Since Greek voters rejected austerity measures in a referendum on July 5, the country has ventured into unknown territory. Cut loose from financial aid, the bills are piling up. Some of the more important unpaid invoices are for medicines, which accounted for 5.5% of the country’s imports in 2014. Foreign pharmaceutical companies are owed more than €1 billion ($1.1 billion) for supplies shipped in the first half of this year, according to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
Since Greek voters rejected austerity measures in a referendum on July 5, the country has ventured into unknown territory. Cut loose from financial aid, the bills are piling up. Some of the more important unpaid invoices are for medicines, which accounted for 5.5% of the country’s imports in 2014. Foreign pharmaceutical companies are owed more than €1 billion ($1.1 billion) for supplies shipped in the first half of this year, according to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
Greece’s drug debt will barely register in terms of the global $18.8 trillion pharmaceutical trade, and for the time being supplies of drugs will continue. Still, EFPIA director Richard Bergström, in a letter (pdf) to the European commissioner for health Vytenis Andriukaitis, warned about possible future shortages due to the distortion that will come from the “” in medicines if Greece were to exit the euro and reintroduce a vastly devalued drachma. (In essence, wholesalers would buy up cheap drugs in Greece in order to sell them elsewhere at a mark-up.)
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This view is however debated by the European Association of Euro-Pharmaceutical Companies (EAEPC), a trade group that represents wholesalers engaged in the parallel trade of medicines. In its own letter (pdf) to the same European commissioner, accuses pharmaceutical manufacturers of greed and seeking to exploit the crisis to hurt the wholesale trade, stating that:
It is telling that the wealthy pharmaceutical industry is exploiting the potential advent of another crisis in Greece for their own commercial purposes in portraying a medicines shortage in the country in the coming weeks and months.
If they emerge, drug shortages wouldn’t be new in Greece, as they happened in the recent past following public hospital defaults. In 2013, the government published a list of 50 companies accused of unfairly stopping their supply of drugs to Greece. Some of the companies involved in the 2013 shortage have addressed the situation, and Roche said in a statement that the company is “working to understand the full implications of yesterday’s referendum decision and will both review and take steps to revise its operating plans as needed.”
In the meantime, Greek doctors have been advised to “prescribe drugs in according to the needs of each patient, and not according to any requests for patients drug supply” in order to avoid hoarding and the depletion of supplies.
