By Dr A Q Khan
There are some crimes that even the most kind-hearted pacifist would agree call for exemplary punishment. These include rape, child molestation, kidnapping of girls, kidnapping for ransom and murder of innocent people over petty material things.
There is one particular menace I would personally like to add to this list of crimes - i.e., adulteration of food and production and marketing of spurious drugs. No punishment could be severe enough for those who play with the lives and health of others.
The Holy Quran says that saving a human life is like saving humanity. In the same sense we could say that killing a human being is like killing humanity.
Geo TV used to air an excellent programme on this menace. Ms Huma Bokhari and her team would visit market areas and show pictures of filthy shops/bakeries and factories producing unhygienic edibles and spurious medicines. It was horribly fascinating to see, and frightening to contemplate, what we are unknowingly swallowing.
A few examples are the use of harmful acid to clean ginger, the use of water from storm drains to dilute milk, tap water to make mineral water and soft drinks, poisonous leather dyes to colour spices and sweets, coloured gram shells mixed in with tea, motor oil into edible ghee and oils, to name but a few. All this goes on under the nose of government officials.
Some time ago the executive director of PIMS found spurious medicines being sold in a pharmacy run by a pharmaceutical company on PIMS premises. A few months ago TV covered a raid on a big pharmaceutical factory producing so-called “life saving” drugs. According to reports, more than Rs2 billion worth of raw materials imported from abroad were shown.
All such activities are increasing day by day due to lack of action by the authorities concerned. Added to this is the slow, half-hearted action taken on such cases by the judiciary. It is difficult to imagine that the human race, especially Muslims, could stoop to such despicable acts. And yet many of them are done by those who claim to be good Muslims.
One of them might even be the person praying next to you in the mosque! This curse of adulteration is rampant only in the subcontinent. Sixty to sixty-five percent of all our edibles and medicines are counterfeit/adulterated. Maj Gen Hakeem Arshad Qureshi wrote in his autobiography, The 1971 Indo-Pak War, that the subcontinent is fertile in producing traitors.
To this I would like to add, not only traitors, but all sorts of cheaters. We also totally lack communal spirit. Look at the plastic bags and garbage dumped in storm drains and along roadsides, the empty cigarette cartons, tissue boxes, crisp bags and sweets wrappers thrown out of car windows. My colleagues and I have travelled to some of the poorest countries of Africa a number of times.
We even went to Timbuktu, a city in the middle of nowhere in northern Mali and an ancient cradle of Islamic civilisation. There we saw neatly maintained 1,200-year-old mosques and an Islamic document centre. No luxuries like air-conditioners, fancy display cabinets and lighting. In these African countries the people sometimes don’t even have two square meals a day, but we never saw any adulteration or found (or heard of) spurious drugs. Nigeria is the exception. Adulteration is a crime which plays with people’s lives. There is a Hadith that says: “He who adulterates does not belong to us.”
The meaning of adulteration here should be taken in its widest sense-to include food, medicines, religion, justice, truth and honesty. Though this is compulsory abroad, even most multinationals here do not bother to state the ingredients used, nor their respective quantities, in their products. This poses a direct threat to public health as people often have adverse affects from one or more of those ingredients, even if the contents are not generally harmful - peanut allergies being one of the most common that comes to mind. Melamine in high quantities can be fatal to small children.
Survey and tests of cold drinks, unpacked tea, spices and medicines have produced shocking figures of adulteration which make them dangerous for human consumption. According to the World Health Organisation, the global trade in counterfeit drugs is worth more than $35 billion per year. With such a demand, no wonder the business is thriving and is so lucrative. It has led to widespread corruption in government agencies responsible for controlling this menace. According to another survey, Pakistanis end up using a large portion of their budgets on fake and spurious drugs.
Laws and rules do exist to deal with it and there are government agencies and staff to enforce them. But corruption, lack of interest, lack of accountability and, above all, delay in punishment to the culprits, all lead to the flourishing of this business.
If you are interested in statistics, there are numerous reports issued, both by the WHO and our ministry of health. As usual, such problems are not solved by reports full of graphs and figures.
A solution could be fairly simple-enforce the laws and punish the culprits. It is unforgivable on the part of the responsible agencies not to enforce the law to control this menace. However, this would require honest implementation of law-i.e., giving culprits the punishment they deserve. It would also mean holding accountable those officials not carrying out their job effectively.
To all those engaged in these nefarious activities, for the love of your fellow human beings and countrymen, STOP. If not on humanitarian grounds, then remember that the wrath of Allah for wrongdoers. Don’t bargain the short-term benefits of this world for the doom of hell in the Hereafter. All your prayers and giving of alms will be null and void. Earn an honest living and obtain the blessings of Allah Almighty. It is never too late to repent.
(Source: The News)
