Cape Town - Retail pharmacies are signing up for a plan to help tackle the misuse of medicines that include codeine in an effort to curb addiction to the potentially deadly drug.
The new project aims to create a centralised database that tracks customers’ buying history and personal details.
With this information, pharmacists hope to monitor individuals who may be abusing the drug, which is highly addictive and relatively easy to buy. Codeine is a narcotic typically found in painkillers and cough suppressants.
The Codeine Care Project will launch at the South African Pharmacy Council Conference in Sun City next month. Aside from a database, the project will use bar codes on the back of codeine medications to monitor drug sales. Consumers can scan the code with their phones to receive information on the medication’s proper use.
“We started with the project because we know the potential of people to misuse codeine products,” said Johan Botha, director at the Community Pharmacist Sector (CPS) of the Pharmaceutical Society of SA, who is spearheading the project.
The abuse of these medications can cause stomach ulcers, kidney failure or even death.
“Patients can take the tablets without recognising that they are misusing them,” said David Bayever of Drug Wise.
“People don’t realise it is an opiate and become dependent without even knowing it.”
Common codeine products include Aspen’s Dolorol and Adcock Ingram’s Myprodol.
Many medications that include codeine are available without a prescription. At present there is no centralised way of monitoring who buys codeine at pharmacies, meaning that it is easy for patients to buy harmful quantities of the drug.
The CPS system attempts to make it more difficult for patients to abuse codeine products through consolidating patient buying history in a database. Major pharmacies like Dis-Chem, MediRite and Clicks have already signed on to access the database.
The Codeine Care Project will help pharmacists identify people who are at risk of abusing the drug by providing pharmacies with certain information such as patient ID numbers and six-month history, said Botha.
“We are not the police, we are there to help the patients,” he said. “We want to be able to refer patients to hotlines to help clean themselves up.”
The Medical Research Council had found there was “considerable abuse of over-the-counter and prescription medicines”, including codeine.
Between 73 percent and 83 percent of patients who had over-the-counter or prescription medicines as their primary substance of abuse were females aged between 32 and 44 years. - Cape Times