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Lebanon Faces Medicine Shortages, Stocks Won’t Last More than a Month

A man counts US dollar banknotes next to Lebanese pounds at a currency exchange shop in Beirut, Lebanon April 24, 2020. (Reuters)
A man counts US dollar banknotes next to Lebanese pounds at a currency exchange shop in Beirut, Lebanon April 24, 2020. (Reuters)
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Lebanon Faces Medicine Shortages, Stocks Won’t Last More than a Month

A man counts US dollar banknotes next to Lebanese pounds at a currency exchange shop in Beirut, Lebanon April 24, 2020. (Reuters)
A man counts US dollar banknotes next to Lebanese pounds at a currency exchange shop in Beirut, Lebanon April 24, 2020. (Reuters)

Since March, the Lebanese have been suffering from the shortage of a number of medicines, especially those for chronic diseases, for intermittent periods that used to reach 15 days.

Today, obtaining some medications requires a tour of a number of pharmacies and promises to secure them after periods that may exceed a month.

“This is due to some citizens resorting to stockpiling medicine for fear of interruption or increase of prices in the event that Lebanon’s Central Bank stops subsidizing this sector,” Mahdi, the manager of a pharmacy in Beirut, told Asharq Al-Awsat.

The Central Bank, which provides credit lines to importers of wheat, fuel and medicine, at the official dollar rate, which is still fixed at LBP 1,515, announced that at the end of 2020, it would no longer be able to continue to subsidize these materials in light of the shrinking reserves of foreign currencies.

Mahdi asserts that in June and July, many customers “have sought to buy stocks for a whole year.”

Some pharmacies “used to provide the patient with the quantities he requested, but the distributing companies recently determined the quantities that they give to each pharmacy based on its usual monthly need,” he noted.

The head of the Pharmacists Syndicate, Ghassan Al-Amin, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the panic caused by the Central Bank’s announcement of its inability to continue subsidizing fuel, wheat and medicine after the end of 2020 prompted the Lebanese to stockpile medications, especially since they know that lifting the subsidy means that the drug price will be linked to the dollar valuation in the black market.

The prices will increase by five, based on the current dollar exchange rate in the black market, according to Al-Amin.

He noted that the problem further worsened “with the slow import movement due to the Central Bank’s mechanism to open credit lines for importers based on the official exchange rate.”

Al-Amin stressed that the stock of medicine in warehouses, which used to last for six months, is now insufficient for more than one and a half months, warning of a real disaster that will affect the citizens after the subsidy is lifted.

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'We Don't Want to Die Here': Sierra Leone Migrants Trapped in Lebanon

Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon -AFP
Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon -AFP
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'We Don't Want to Die Here': Sierra Leone Migrants Trapped in Lebanon

Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon -AFP
Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon -AFP

When an Israeli airstrike killed her employer and destroyed nearly everything she owned in southern Lebanon, it also crushed Fatima Samuella Tholley's hopes of returning home to Sierra Leone to escape the war.

With a change of clothes stuffed into a plastic bag, the 27-year-old housekeeper told AFP that she and her cousin made their way to the capital Beirut in an ambulance.

Bewildered and terrified, the pair were thrust into the chaos of the bombarded city -- unfamiliar to them apart from the airport where they had arrived months before.

"We don't know today if we will live or not, only God knows," Fatima told AFP via video call, breaking down in tears.
"I have nothing... no passport, no documents," she said.

The cousins have spent days sheltering in the cramped storage room of an empty apartment, which they said was offered to them by a man they had met on their journey.

With no access to TV news and unable to communicate in French or Arabic, they could only watch from their window as the city was pounded by strikes.

The Israeli war on Lebanon since mid-September has killed more than 1,000 people and forced hundreds of thousands more to flee their homes, amid Israeli bombards around the country.

The situation for the country's migrant workers is particularly precarious, as their legal status is often tied to their employer under the "kafala" sponsorship system governing foreign labor.

"When we came here, our madams received our passports, they seized everything until we finished our contract" said 29-year-old Mariatu Musa Tholley, who also works as a housekeeper.

"Now [the bombing] burned everything, even our madams... only we survived".

- 'They left me' -

Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon, with the aim of providing emergency travel certificates to those without passports, Kai S. Brima from the foreign affairs ministry told AFP.

The poor west African country has a significant Lebanese community dating back over a century, which is heavily involved in business and trade.

Scores of migrants travel to Lebanon every year, with the aim of paying remittances to support families back home.

"We don't know anything, any information", Mariatu said.

"[Our neighbours] don't open the door for us because they know we are black", she wept.

"We don't want to die here".

Fatima and Mariatu said they had each earned $150 per month, working from 6:00 am until midnight seven days a week.

They said they were rarely allowed out of the house.

AFP contacted four other Sierra Leonean domestic workers by phone, all of whom recounted similar situations of helplessness in Beirut.

Patricia Antwin, 27, came to Lebanon as a housekeeper to support her family in December 2021.

She said she fled her first employer after suffering sexual harassment, leaving her passport behind.

When an airstrike hit the home of her second employer in a southern village, Patricia was left stranded.

"The people I work for, they left me, they left me and went away," she told AFP.

Patricia said a passing driver saw her crying in the street and offered to take her to Beirut.

Like Fatima and Mariatu, she has no money or formal documentation.

"I only came with two clothes in my plastic bag", she said.

- Sleeping on the streets -

Patricia initially slept on the floor of a friend's apartment, but moved to Beirut's waterfront after strikes in the area intensified.

She later found shelter at a Christian school in Jounieh, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the capital.

"We are seeing people moving from one place to another", she said.

"I don't want to lose my life here," she added, explaining she had a child back in Sierra Leone.

Housekeeper Kadij Koroma said she had been sleeping on the streets for almost a week after fleeing to Beirut when she was separated from her employer.

"We don't have a place to sleep, we don't have food, we don't have water," she said, adding that she relied on passers by to provide bread or small change for sustenance.

Kadij said she wasn't sure if her employer was still alive, or if her friends who had also travelled from Sierra Leone to work in Lebanon had survived the bombardment.

"You don't know where to go," she said, "everywhere you go, bomb, everywhere you go, bomb".