A COMPANY in Luohu District bought more than 10,000 boxes containing more than 1.2 million bottles of cough syrup last year and sold them to small stores illegally, the city s drug administration said last week.
The company, Shenzhen Xindi Co. Ltd., was closed by the department. Six key officials, including the general manager and vice general managers, were detained by police. About 4,000 boxes containing 500,000 bottles of syrup were confiscated by the drug department, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported.
They were also found to have evaded an unspecified sum of taxes in a joint investigation by police, the drug administration and the taxation department.
The administration received an anonymous call Aug. 9 last year, claiming there was a large amount of cough syrup stored in a warehouse in Luohu District.
According to a preliminary investigation, the 4,000 boxes were owned by Xindi which bought them from two pharmaceutical companies in Jiangsu and Hebei provinces through legal channels. Sales records showed the company had bought more than 1.2 million bottles in 2010.
However, Guangdong Province sold only about 500,000 bottles of this cough remedy a year, so it was out of the ordinary to buy such a large amount for storage. Also, restricted drugs had to be stored in special warehouses for medicines, not a random warehouse in an industrial zone, an unidentified administration official told the newspaper.
The administration and police later found the drugs had been quietly sold to small private stores in Luohu District which then illegally sold the drugs to students. One of the stores had already been punished several times by the drug department for selling cough syrup to students, the newspaper said.
Prescription drug abuse among young students has become a serious problem in Shenzhen, which has the largest number of students involved in drug abuse in Guangdong Province. To curb the problem, city pharmacies had been prohibited from selling cough syrup without a prescription since 2009, earlier media reports said.
Cough syrup containing codeine phosphate is regulated as a pharmaceutical drug by the WHO. (Wang Yuanyuan)
