History
The SPC was established in 1971 under the State Industrial Corporations Act Number 49 of 1957, as a result of the Report in March of that year of the Bibile - Wickramasinghe commission, appointed by the then Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Its founder chairman was Professor Seneka Bibile.
The SPC channelled all imports and production of pharmaceuticals, calling for worldwide bulk tenders which were limited to the approved drugs listed in the National Formulary. The public and private health sectors had to obtain all their requirements from the SPC. Hence the stranglehold of the Multinational corporations on the drug trade was successfully broken and they were made to compete with each other and with generic drug producers, enabling the country to obtain drugs much cheaper. Branded drugs were replaced by generic drugs in the prescription and sale of medicines.
In 1972 the SPC imported 52 drugs at a third of their previous prices. In 1973, the SPC itself bought the raw material necessary for 14 private processing laboratories established in the island. Some drug prices dropped by half or two-thirds. The SPC bought from an Indian company the raw material necessary for a widely used tranquilliser at a much lower price than that charged by a Swiss multinational.
The Prescriber, a quarterly publication edited by the National Formulary Committee, was published by the SPC and distributed to all medical personnel. The extravagant promotional practices of drugs manufacturers were stopped to remove the dangers and costs inherent in process.
With the election of the Multi-National-friendly United National Party Government of 1977, the SPC was called upon to compete with the private sector. There was continued government control of the types of drugs imported, but permission was given to the private sector to import multiple brands. The SPC was never dissolved and continued to supply affordable drugs, continuing to be responsible for centralised procurement for the government health sector.
Read more about this topic: State Pharmaceuticals Corporation Of Sri Lanka
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (19121989)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernisms high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtainthat which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)