One doctor, two shops, yet centre sold 50 lakh opioid tabs

Vishav Bharti & Gurbax Puri
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh/Tarn Taran, Jan 16

A 200 square yard area and one doctor. This is Sankalp Drug Dependence Treatment Centre in Tarn Taran, which shockingly dispensed more than 50 lakh tablets of buprenorphine in six months last year.

A ‘confidential’ report prepared by Punjab’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the purchase and sale of de-addiction drug buprenorphine (combined with naloxone) found that 74 private de-addiction centres had distributed 4.5 crore tablets in a year. The Tarn Taran centre topped the chart.

Being run from two floors of twin shops across a road running parellel to the Civil Hospital, it is full of patients, most of them youngsters. Centre owner Rohit Takiar lives in Amritsar. He claims they have one psychiatrist, Dr Anil Kumar from Surat, Gujarat, who examines 450 patients every day. 

However, when The Tribune team visited the centre last week, a manager, who identified himself as Deepak Kumar, claimed they received at least 100 patients per day. The centre’s indoor facility was as good as non-functional with only four of the 10 beds occupied. Going by the number of patients cited by the manager, none of these should have been vacant. Opened in 2016, the Tarn Taran centre sold 9.6 lakh tablets of the habit-forming drug in 2017. Surprisingly, in the first six months of 2018, the business swelled manifold with the centre selling over 50 lakh tablets. 

The question is how was the centre able to dispense such a large number of tablets? The FDA report has expressed the apprehension  that a large number of private centres may have  turned into bulk sale points for buprenorphine.

The centre’s mother company — Suman Info Health Care Pvt Ltd — entered the business a few years ago and is now the biggest player running 16 centres. Not only that, it also manufactures different de-addiction drugs under the name of Arbour Biotec.

The Sankalp centre charges a mere Rs 50 as doctor’s fee. Its main income is from selling buprenorphine at Rs 265 per strip (comprising 10 tablets). A young addict from Varpal village, located on the Amritsar-Tarn Taran road, said he was not enrolled with the centre. "But I know many villagers who buy medicine from the centre. They oblige me too," he claimed, smiling.