Director of the Criminal Investigations Depart-ment (CID) in the Malawi Police Services Em-manuel Soko who is also responsible for the drug section has called for urgent financial, technical and material support for effectively investigating, apprehending and bringing to justice offenders of medicinal drug theft and pilferage in public health facilities.
Soko made the call on 25th February 2022 in Salima at a consultative meeting on Drug Theft and Pilferage organized by the Network of Journalists Living with HIV (JONEHA) with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun-dation through AVAC under the COMPASS Af-rica Initiative. He said the drug section is in dire need of both local and international train-ing. He lamented that the drug section has only 10 officers trained in drug investigations out of the available 160.
The CID Director reported that mobility is an-other big challenge in the drug section be-cause there is only one vehicle for operation throughout the country a situation that is visi-bly demonstrating the need to fill the wide gap for smooth operation. He said in the world’s growing high technology; the CID drug section has to align with developments such as use of computers which are currently inadequate in all regional offices, airports, borders, stations and national headquarters.
The CID Director reported that mobility is an-other big challenge in the drug section be-cause there is only one vehicle for operation throughout the country a situation that is visi-bly demonstrating the need to fill the wide gap for smooth operation. He said in the world’s growing high technology; the CID drug section has to align with developments such as use of computers which are currently inadequate in all regional offices, airports, borders, stations and national headquarters.
“There is a need to have the field testing kits in place for easy identification of drugs… we used to have them but we have run short of reagents,” said Soko adding that the tools have the capacity to detect both hard and medicinal drugs.
He further said though the drug unit has successfully apprehended some of the offenders there is a great need for a replacement of the 1956 legislation with the current 2019 PMRA Act which has unfortunately not been popularized especially within the judiciary. This means the judiciary is still using an outdated law which has very lenient sentences.
He noted that while the presence of Confidential Human Intelligence sources popularly known as Informants has proved to be key to successful investigations; there is a need to motivate them and increase their number as a way of establishing an informant network to boost information flow that can bring a change to the situation.
Soko observed that though it depends on commitment from people at higher level to eliminate drug theft and pilferage; the issue demands multi-agency collaboration and availability of resources.
“Theft and pilferage of medicines is a sensitive issue and cancerous to patients’ survival and credibility to the health care delivery system; the battle cannot be won by one-foot soldier,” he emphasized.
