Statement: ‘It is antisocial to hoard medicines’

Agree: hoarding medicines is antisocial

There is an alternative for the vast majority of medicines that are not available. What about your own medicines? can be found on this website. The KNMP professional body writes: ‘In practice, pharmacists solve 99 percent of the shortages by offering medication with the same active ingredient from another brand, devising a therapeutic alternative, importing it or preparing it themselves.’

If you then start hoarding, for example by requesting a repeat prescription for six months instead of three months, or by getting medicines earlier than necessary, you make the problem worse. People are told ‘no’ in the pharmacy, while their medicines are in medicine cabinets of hoarders. So better not do it. In addition, the problem will partly be solved if the new law is in place. Pharmacists and wholesalers must keep an ‘iron’ stock from 1 January 2023, so that shortages occur less often.

DON’T: unfortunately, hoarding is necessary

For the EpiPen in allergic reactions, the alternatives are also running out, read this article about this as well. Pharmacists have sounded the alarm about this. If you’re at risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction, you’ll be happy if there’s still a pen in the house, even if it’s past its expiration date. There is an official list of medicines that cannot be exchanged, read more about it here. If your drug is on that list and a shortage is looming, you can hardly help but take precautions and hoard. The drugs against Parkinson’s disease, of which there is now a serious shortage, are a poignant example of this.

Also the new law that prescribes an ‘iron supply’ of 2.5 months, is not always a solution. Some medicines will only be available again in 2023. For certain patients there is therefore no other way out than to start hoarding, if that works.

What do you think? Reply to the statement: