Medicines used by drug addicts stolen from GMC again

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, March 21

An unidentified person stole medicines kept at the Opioid Substitute Therapy Centre at Government Medical College here on Sunday. According to officials at the centre, 1,826 tablets of Buprenorphine 2 mg and 711 tablets of Samoset 0.4 mg were stolen from the centre.

A CCTV camera at the centre has recorded a masked man breaking open the cupboards. These medicines are given free of cost to drug addicts who come to the centre daily.

In September last year, around 11,000 tablets of Buprenorphine were stolen from the centre because the centre was closed on Sunday. Later, the police had arrested two patients enrolled with the centre. However, they had recovered only 2,920 tablets because the thieves had claimed that they had thrown the rest of the tablets in a canal.

A strip of 10 Buprenorphine tablets costs around Rs 100 in the black market and it is also misused by many drug addicts to get a high.

In a complaint to the police, in charge of the OST Centre, Dr Arshdeep Kaur, said the theft was reported by a few hospital employees who had spotted the centre’s open entrance on Sunday. She said later, when the employees went inside, they found the medicines missing.

Though the authorities had stopped storing medicines in bulk at the centre, a second theft within six months has revealed the lack of security at Guru Nanak Dev Hospital.

Meanwhile, the Civil Lines police station has registered a case under Sections 380 and 457 of the IPC. Police officials said they were checking the CCTV footage from the centre and nearby areas to get clues about the identity of the thief. They suspected the hand of an insider, most probably a patient of the centre, behind the theft of the medicines.