While people are often spending hours going from one pharmacy to another across Lebanon to find the medicine they need to treat their illness, medicinal drugs are constantly being smuggled out of the country.
Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF) announced that its airport security platoon busted a medicine-smuggling operation at Beirut-Rafik Hariri International Airport.
The suspect, a 52-year-old Egyptian national, was caught trying to smuggle a number of pharmaceutical drugs to Egypt, the ISF’s public relations department said in a statement.
The seized goods, which included dozens of blister packs of Panadol, Colchicine, Solpadeine, Sabril, and other medicines, were found stashed inside a loudspeaker that the arrested suspect failed to smuggle past airport security.
According to the statement, the suspect claimed during his interrogation that he had received the loudspeaker from an Egyptian friend of his to transfer it to his family in Egypt, without knowing that it contained the drugs.
The busted operation is the latest of several instances of medicine-smuggling that have been caught in Lebanon in recent times.
Twitter/ISF
These crimes are taking place amid a paralyzing economic crisis, accompanied by hard rationing, which has made it difficult for people in Lebanon to obtain necessary medicines for treatment.
The Lebanese are anticipating the end of the central bank’s subsidies of essential items, including medicine, which is expected to take place at the end of the current year, causing the prices of these items to skyrocket.
