The party committee of Samjiyon, Yanggang Province, recently held an emergency meeting following a rash of deaths from illegal narcotics, which people are taking due to shortages of legal medications.
A Daily NK source in Yanggang Province said Thursday that fever cases continue to climb, but faced with drug shortages, people are self-medicating with opium or Chinese compound aminopyrine and phenacetin tablets, with some dying as a result. The Samjiyon party committee called in officials late last month for an emergency meeting to discuss measures to deal with the problem.
On May 27, the wife and seven-year-old son of a security official attached to a historical site in Samjiyon died after ingesting narcotics.
When anti-fever medication failed to improve their fevers, they turned to narcotic Chinese painkillers. They then turned to opium after the narcotic failed to have any effect.
When their symptoms worsened, the two were rushed to Samjiyon Hospital, but they died the next day. The source said the hospital believed the son and mother died after failing to regain consciousness following their ingestion of opium.
“With hospitals and pharmacies running out of fever medications, people in emergency situations often feel forced to turn to compound aminopyrine and phenacetin tablets, a narcotic Chinese painkiller. But most people can’t even get those painkillers,” said the source. “When people ask if it’s COVID-19, the hospitals insist they’re just suffering from fevers and simply prescribe them fever medication. But people have no choice but to use narcotics because there are no medications available [to purchase].”
Samjiyon’s party committee had been receiving daily reports of the situation, but was frozen in anxiety about what to do.
However, as deaths continued to mount, the party committee convened an emergency meeting on Sunday morning to discuss measures to deal with the issue.
At the meeting, the committee underscored that people in hospitals or receiving treatment at home must use state-prescribed medications going forward, noting the need for people to be given medications specific to their symptoms.
The committee engaged in a bit of intimidation, too, branding the illegal use and distribution of opium and other narcotics as an “anti-state act” that creates chaos in the government’s emergency quarantine system.
However, the source said the meeting failed to discuss how to resolve the drug shortages. “As a result, emergency quarantine officials and hospital officials who attended the meeting quietly criticized it as hopeless,” he said.
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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