State pharmacies run short as the street rate climbs

TALAS — Patients in Talas and Nurzhan are finding gaps on the shelves of the numbered state pharmacies, which sell a fixed-price list of about 180 essential medicines in som. Pharmacists at five of the city's state pharmacies said this week that insulin, blood-pressure tablets, children's antibiotics and several heart drugs had been out of stock for days at a time since July.

Almost all medicines in Irad are imported through Kazakhstan and priced from dollars. The state pharmacies' list prices are set at the official rate of 8.40 som to the dollar, while importers now pay something closer to the bazaar rate, which passed 10.5 this week. "We order, and the order comes back half filled," said the manager of State Pharmacy No. 7 on Kurmanjan Datka Street. "The supplier says the rest will come when the price is fixed. The price is fixed. That is the problem."

Private pharmacies, among them the Shıpa Dariykana chain, have most of the same medicines at market prices, in some cases at nearly twice the state price. The Ministry of Health said a list of "priority items" would be delivered to the state pharmacies by the end of the month and that there was "no shortage, only a delay".

At the Regional Hospital, a cardiologist said several patients had stopped taking their tablets for a week or more because they could not afford the private price. "They come back to us," she said, "and then it costs more."