The scope and depth of pressures and sanctions against Tehran and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear policies are expanding and beginning to cover a multitude of areas. Although certain aspects of outcomes and repercussions of the present challenge and the insistence of Iranian and Western policymakers on keeping their positions are visible and obvious, certain other layers have placed the Iranian people in challenging and gradually threatening positions; in this respect, the impact of the sanctions on the country’s pharmaceutical industry is notable.
According to reports presented by officials in this sector, more than 96 percent of the country’s necessary medicines are prepared and manufactured domestically, inside the country. However, the same report indicates that the raw materials for 99 percent of manufactured medicines inside the country is imported (1). Obviously, the present problems and limitations concerning obtaining new letters of credit and the rise in price of raw materials has pushed the country’s pharmaceutical industry toward preparing and buying raw materials from countries such as China, India, Pakistan, etc., countries where there is an abundance of cheap raw material. This condition, in addition to the rise in the price of secondary material used in manufacturing various medicines has a clear and predictable outcome in the near future: higher prices, shortage and lower quality medicines.
Worrisome and concerning news reports on this issue are not hard to find. For instance, it is noted that the production of antibiotics will stop this coming fall (2). It is not hard to imagine the gradual shut down of the country’s pharmaceutical industry and its shift to importing medicine – of qualities below international standards. The unemployment of workers and staff in the country’s pharmaceutical industry and higher dependence of that industry to sources outside the country are only the visible aspects of the present crisis. The more dangerous and unpleasant aspect of that is the threat to health of citizens. Imagining a winter in which amoxicillin and other antibiotics are hard or impossible to find is very worrisome.
Perhaps it is possible to somewhat ignore the present problem when it comes to medicines that are not of highest importance or regarded to be lifesaving. However, it is difficult to imagine what inhumane and terrible consequences the present problem has on medicines needed by patients suffering from life threatening or chronic diseases (such as heart disease).
These realities and the increasing deterioration in conditions have not escaped the eyes of officials and those in power. That is why, on one level, “storing medicine” is on he agenda, while on another (higher) level, the Islamic Republic is seeking to reach a compromise with the West.
In such conditions, hardly anyone inside Iran doubts that achieving an agreement with the West (given the imposed costs) is less costly than sustaining the present challenges, leading to expansion in sanctions or even war. But one must be hopeful that this compromise does not take so long that its unpleasant consequences affect aspects that threaten the lives of human beings: lives of newborns and innocent infants, lives of patients awaiting operation in hospital rooms, lives of people suffering from untreatable or life threatening diseases, lives of pregnant women, lives of patients in need and in pain in hard to reach corners of the country, etc. In one word, lives of the Iranian people.
Iranian government officials continue to repeat the slogan that “nuclear energy is the obvious right of Iranian people.” However, they must not forget that a healthy life free from disease and pain is a “more obvious” right of the same people. The Iranian regime must seriously reconsider its interpretation of “national interest,” and not to look at it the lens of “regime and political system’s interest,” which fuels its “cost-benefit” analysis in the nuclear game.
