The Hon. Dewananda Suraweera
Hon. Dewananda Suraweera raised concerns about penalties under the NMRA Act for pharmacists dispensing medicines without prescriptions, noting that the public commonly seeks chronic medications such as metformin, atorvastatin and losartan without prescriptions. He asked whether heavy court fines and the requirement to publish a multilingual newspaper notice admitting guilt are proportionate, and whether the advertisement requirement can be removed.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Supplementary: Under the NMRA Act, pharmacists cannot dispense medicines without a doctor’s prescription, including antibiotics. However, the public are accustomed to purchasing chronic medications such as metformin, atorvastatin, and losartan without prescriptions. When pharmacists dispense on public insistence, they face heavy court fines and must also publish a multilingual newspaper advertisement declaring guilt. Is such a penalty proportionate, and can this requirement be removed?
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 7 March 2025 ·No. 1743066559006904 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/17883
Cite as: The Hon. Dewananda Suraweera. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 7 March 2025. No. 1743066559006904. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/17883