The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), as part of its strategy to address the problem of drug and substance abuse in Nigeria, has revealed that it has established efficient systems to monitor and trace the distribution of illicit substances, including counterfeit and substandard medications.
It pointed out that with narcotic drug serialization, the agency will be able to track and trace narcotic items from the manufacturing plant, where they are made, all the way to the patient, who is the final user.
The Director General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, announced the plan at the commissioning of the narcotic drugs serialization pilot project in Lagos last Friday, according to a statement signed by Sayo Akintola, the resident media consultant for NAFDAC.
Adeyeye noted 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, adding that this will be replicated for all other NAFDAC-regulated drug products.
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 Minister for Health in October 2020’’.
The DG said that the narcotic drugs serialization pilot project symbolizes a significant milestone in the agency’s commitment to delivering quality, productive, and easily verifiable medical products to the Nigerian consumer by adequately securing the drug distribution network.
