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Popular East Jakarta drugstores closed for a week
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Owners of drugstores at Pramuka Market in East Jakarta close their kiosks on Tuesday as they apply for the official pharmacy license from the government. (Warta Kota/Joko Supriyanto)
S
ome 294 drugstores at Pramuka Market, East Jakarta, are set to be closed for a week while the owners of the stores apply for the official pharmacy license from the government.
The secretary general of Pramuka Market drug sellers association, Yoyon, said the store owners would rather lose a huge amount of money than running the businesses without a license.
“We will surely lose money, but we don’t want to be deemed as violators of the law. We want to run the business in accordance with the law,” Yoyon said on Tuesday as quoted by tribunnews.com.
Should the government fail to grant the licenses swiftly, they would keep the stores closed until receiving the license, Yoyon said.
Pramuka Market is known to Jakarta residents as the one-stop shop for cheap medicines and medical equipment, with its drugstores classified as public pharmacies.
However, since the Health Ministry revoked regulation 284/2007 concerning public pharmacy's in October last year, drugstores at the market no longer had a legal basis to run their business.
As a result, the drugstores were often blamed for distributing illegal drugs and vaccines in the city.
“We hope that after revoking the regulation, the government can help us to manage our business,” Yoyon said. (cal)
