Exclusive: India battles big pharma over cough syrup abuse, reducing supplies
By Aditya Kalra and Paritosh Bansal NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Indian regulators are privately pressuring major drug firms to better police how they sell popular codeine-based cough syrups to tackle smuggling and addiction, a move that is reducing supplies of a medicine doctors say is an effective treatment. India's Cipla stopped making the product last year owing to regulatory demands, and U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories and Pfizer have had to reduce batch sizes by up to half, cutting how much medicine their factories can produce. Regulators want to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to track cough syrup abuse in the country and bottles smuggled to neighboring Bangladesh, where it was banned in the 1980s but is still sought by addicts.
