At a meeting yesterday, the DA also decided to deploy drugs superintendents at Zia International Airport, Benapole Land Port, Chittagong sea- and airport and Mongla seaport for the inspection and put the decisions into immediate operation.

It said backups from a special police force would support the superintendents.

The DA sought cooperation of the inspector general of police (IGP) for surprise raids on drugstores to seize contraband drugs.

The DA move came in the wake of intelligence that huge spurious drugs enter Bangladesh and go largely undetected because of poor inspection. Ninety percent of smuggled drugs are substandard, DA sources said quoting their findings.

Currently, anti-smuggling inspections are in force, but not at all entry points.

Drug importers are supposed to send their samples to the DA and import drugs on clearance, a system largely confined to papers.

"Under the new system, drug superintendents will collect samples at random and send them to laboratories for verification of their properties through chemical analysis," said Abdul Gani, DA director.

"Only after satisfactory quality clearance, imports will get a nod."

"We have a lot of reports that counterfeit drugs are being smuggled into Bangladesh on all routes, including air and the sea."

"We have only 40 drug superintendents and inspectors in 25 branches across the country to monitor contraband and fake drugs sales. Now we will send a superintendent to each of the ports for inspection," Gani added.

Earlier this year, the Public Health and Drugs Testing Laboratory in its annual testing of 5,000 local samples found 300 either counterfeits or of very low quality.

Bangladesh has about 30,000 illegal drugstores in addition to a similar number of licensed ones.

The US Food and Drug Administration estimates that counterfeits make up more than 10 percent of the global medicine market and are present in both industrialised and developing countries.

The negative impact of the use of spurious drugs on the public health remains unknown, but it is obvious that they are causing fatalities, experts say.

The Drug Testing Laboratory found Cavinton, a drug used for strokes and brain hemorrhage, without main chemical ingredients.

"The presence of fake and illegal drugs in Bangladesh is surprising because we manufacture over 96 percent of our requirements and even export," said Nazmul Hasan, general secretary of Bangladesh Pharmaceutical Industries Association, recently. "We believe fake drugs worth Tk 600 crores to Tk 1,000 crores are making their way into Bangladesh market."

He claimed hundreds of shady drug factories operated on the borders of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, China and Thailand and ran rackets of fake drugs in the region.

Most spurious drugs flood into Bangladesh from India.