Dhaka Drug Court to hold hearing on charge framing on September 6

The Dhaka Drug Court yesterday fixed September 6 for holding a hearing on charge framing against a managing director, a director and three other employees of a now defunct pharmaceutical company for manufacturing toxic paracetamol syrup in 1992.

Judge Atoar Rahman also ordered all the five Polychem Laboratories employees to be present before the court on the same day.     

The accused are the company's managing director Harun-Or-Rashid, director Abdur Rob, manager ANM Golam Qader, pharmacist (Quality Control) Mahbubul Alam, and pharmacist (production) Delwar Hossain.

Paracetamol syrup, a widely used fever reducing drug, made with toxic diethylene glycol caused the death of at least 76 children in 1992 alone.  

The Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) had filed the case against Polychem on January 2, 1993 after tests confirmed that it produced the drug with the poisonous substance.

Paracetamol brands of four other companies, too, had tested positive for diethylene glycol. But the DGDA filed cases against three of them sparing City Chemical and Pharmaceutical.

Proceedings of all the cases came to an abrupt halt after the High Court issued a stay order in 1994. All the accused of Polychem Laboratories have been on bail since then. 

Trial of one of the cases, involving Adflame Pharmaceutical, resumed 16 years later in 2009, as the HC stay order on the proceedings of the case against Adflame was lifted after an investigative report by The Daily Star revealed how manipulation and corruption kept the trial on hold for over 15 years. Stay orders on the other cases were also lifted gradually.

The country's first-ever conviction of drug adulteration against three Adflame employees finally came in 2014.

This month saw the second such conviction of five employees of another company, BCI (Bangladesh), for the same crime committed in 1992.

Two owners of the third company Rex Pharma got acquitted from a Mymensingh drug court in 2003 as the prosecution did not produce the government test results before the court.

Polychem is the last company to be tried in the lower court.

The medicine is usually produced using propylene glycol but a cheaper alternative, diethylene glycol, commonly used in leather production, was used by these drug companies.

This adulteration led to several thousand cases of kidney failures in children in the 1990s. Numerous other children died taking the adulterated medicine.

A study by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University found there were at least 2,700 child deaths from 1982 to 1992 from toxic paracetamol.