Dubai: The Ministry of Health will launch in a few weeks an integrated electronic system to monitor the prescription and use of medicines containing narcotic substances across the UAE, which will link 2,840 pharmacies and repositories, a ministry official said.
This was revealed at the 10th edition of the Hemaya International Forum, which started on Tuesday, where experts confirmed that narcotic pills continue to be the biggest problem in the UAE and some other Arab countries.
The forum, which is organised by Dubai Police in collaboration with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Unoc), among other agencies, brings together people who work in the field of combating drugs from different countries each year to share their expertise.
Dr Ameen Hussain Al Ameri, Assistant Undersecretary for Medical Practices and Licensing at the ministry, who was a speaker at one of the sessions, said the system will monitor the entire process from the time the pills are imported and distributed up until they reach the patient.
Al Ameri explained that if a patient misuses the pills and finishes them before the time of his next prescription and goes back to his doctor for more, the system will not allow the doctor to make another prescription.
“This will make it impossible for patients to legally have access to more pills, unless it is obtained from illegal sources,” he said.
This system, which is in collaboration with Dubai Police, will help detect any illegal or illicit practices by doctors, pharmacists or patients.
The prescription will be electronic and the patient will have to use his Emirates ID to get the drugs, which will make it impossible for the patient to present the same prescription at another pharmacy.
In his presentation, Al Ameri said the UAE was the first in the Arab world and the fourth in the world to make the Spice drug and synthetic cannabinoids illegal. He explained that there are over 400 varieties of synthetic cannabinoids in the world and that they have identified 39 of them here in the UAE.
Synthetic cannabinoids cover any artificial drug that mimics the properties of cannabis and its derivatives. They are made when normal herbs are sprayed with chemicals to give the same effect of cannabinoids.
Ages most at risk
Dr Ahmad Fallah Al Amoush, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Sharjah University, said that in a study conducted in the UAE they found out that children between the ages of 14-17 are most at risk of taking drugs, with age 16 being the most vulnerable.
Wadih Maalouf, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said that there was no precise and comprehensive study of youth drug use and so they tried to find an estimate using an “indirect method of estimation”.
They found out that the estimate for the number of young people between the ages of 11-18 who have tried cannabis at least once in their lives in the Arab World is 6.75 million.
He also said that according to a study in the US, school droupouts are 2.5 times more likely to smoke cigarettes than their school-going counterparts, and 1.8 times more likely to smoke marijuana.
