AMLO Inaugurates ‘Super Pharmacy’ to Supply Medicines to All of Mexico Maria Verza - Associated Press
go to original January 4, 2024

Workers unpack medicine at a “mega-pharmacy” warehouse on its inauguration day in Huehuetoca, Mexico, Friday, Dec. 29, 2023. It is Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution to help end a supply issue for hospitals that don’t have specific medicines needed by patients. (Fernando Llano/AP)

Mexico’s president has inaugurated a huge “super pharmacy” in a bid to end the woes of patients throughout the country who are often told they need a specific medicine — but the hospital in question doesn’t have it.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.

“The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the heath system,” López Obrador said.

The pharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can’t get needed medications at a local hospital, the patient, the patient’s doctor or the pharmacist would be able to call up the warehouse and get it delivered from the huge 40,000 square meter (430,000 square foot) Mexico City warehouse.

The armed forces, or the government-run pharmaceutical company Birmex, will ship the drugs out by land or air “within 24 to 48 hours,” López Obrador pledged.

The question is whether Mexico can overcome its history of being bad at regulating the pharmaceutical industry, bad at buying medicines, bad at storing them, and bad at distributing them. Extreme centralization also hasn’t helped Mexico much in the past in many areas.

The most visible face of this problem are the parents of children with cancer, who frequently stage protests because they say that in recent years chemotherapy and other drugs have been impossible to obtain.

Desperate parents blocked traffic at the Mexico City airport last year, holding up a banner reading: “There isn’t any chemotherapy, treatment or medicines, have some empathy and sensitivity.”

Many of the problems pre-date López Obrador, who took office in late 2018. For decades, there have been scandals involving of millions of dollars worth of medicines going out-of-date at warehouses while hospitals couldn’t get them.

According to the group “Zero Shortages,” the number of prescriptions that went unfilled in Mexico rose from 1.5 million in 2019 to 22 million in 2021; disruptions due to the COVID pandemic probably played a role.

But even in 2022, there were still about 12.5 million prescriptions that went unfilled.

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