The Central Drug Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) is planning to work jointly with the Narcotic Control Bureau (NCB) to train the state drug control officers for sorting out the difficulties faced by them in filling the forms and collection of the information related to narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances in the country.

The decision comes in the wake of an alert from the NCB on the delay of the drug control authority in furnishing statistics in respect of production, consumption, import and export of the narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances required to be submitted to International Narcotics Control Bureau (INCB), Vienna. India, as a signatory to the United Nation's Convention, is obliged to furnish the statistics to the INCB and any failure in submitting the statistics will result in serious damage to the country, according to NCB officials.

The top officials of NCB, in a meeting with the Drug Consultative Committee (DCC) recently, has sought cooperation from the drug regulatory officials to furnish the statistics, which should be submitted in seven prescribed forms. The state drug controllers have to provide information to fill forms B, C and P as per the format. Many of the states have failed to submit information related to narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances in the past.

However, the state drug controllers who were present in the meeting informed the NCB that the respective forms are highly complicated and information sought are difficult to be comprehended on. The officers raised their objection as the information on actual production and consumption of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances' formulations are hard to be obtained from the manufacturers even as the information on basic bulk drugs are easy to avail.

The NCB officials point out that any failure in submitting statistics will have serious impact on the country. The international bureau can put the country which failed to submit adequate statistics into a specific category. This will also lead to stoppage of exports and imports of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances from the country.

It is in the backdrop of this discussion, the NCB officials and the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) decided to work together through the CDSCO zonal offices to conduct the workshops. The idea is to clear the doubts of the state drug control officers in each zones, North, East, West and South, and to train them to fill the forms as per the international requirement.

The workshops will be hosted in each CDSCO zonal office. The details of the workshops would be worked out by the DCGI in consultation with NCB and the zonal officers would be informed accordingly for facilitating the workshop. The DCGI, in the DCC, also requested the state drug controllers to promptly submit the required statistics to meet the timeline for filing information to the INCB.