Adulterated, Fake Drugs Flood Africa : Medicine: In Ivory Coast, for example, prices of medicine have increased by about 80% in a year. A booming black market satisfies some of the demand.

Ayeesha Traore saunters gracefully through the neighborhood, balancing on her head a basin of scarves that veil her true trade.

Under the colorful pile are vials of pills and powders--smuggled prescription drugs for a booming black market.

Since Ivory Coast and other West African countries devalued their common currency a year ago, prices for imported medicines have skyrocketed, forcing people to scour the streets for cheap alternatives. The underground dealings have also attracted clever--and potentially deadly--fakes.

“I’ve had to put up my prices, but it’s still good business,” said Traore, who sells everything from birth control pills to prescription-only antibiotics.

Traore buys most of her drugs from smugglers who bring them in from neighboring Ghana; the rest come from licensed pharmacies. She sells the pills individually at a small profit.

That is an advantage for customers, she said. “They do not have to buy a whole packet instead of six tablets.”

Cheap and accessible medicine is particularly crucial in Africa, where poverty and tropical climates combine to make disease rampant.

In Ivory Coast, prices of medicine have increased by about 80% in the past year. It is not uncommon to find people with several prescriptions standing in drug stores trying to work out which they can afford to buy.

“They end up with the aspirin and not the antibiotics,” said Dr. Rudolph Knippenberg, regional health adviser for the U.N. Children’s Fund in West Africa.

The rise in black-market activity has created another problem--a flood of counterfeit or adulterated drugs, mostly from Nigeria, experts say.

In March, health authorities in Zaire banned drugs imported from elsewhere in West Africa after they said shipments of “unwholesome” antibiotics and pain-killers from Nigeria found their way to Zaire’s markets.

The proliferation of black-market drugs is a side effect of the devaluation of the African franc, known by its French initials as the CFA.

The pharmaceutical business has been hit particularly hard because of its reliance on imports. In Ivory Coast, for example, 90% of medicines come from overseas.

“It’s impossible now. How do they expect us to live?” said Kwesi Coleman, a retired university professor. “I’m on blood pressure medication and it’s terribly expensive.”

Before the devaluation, his medicine cost 35,000 francs a month, about $125 at the old exchange rate. Now, although the same amount sells for the equivalent of $105, the price for Coleman is 60,000 francs--about 15% of his monthly pension.

Drug imports take up as much as 50% of health budgets in black African countries, UNICEF said in a recent report.

Some West African governments have tried to temporarily freeze drug prices, but with mixed success. Many pharmacies ignore the rules and enforcement is spotty. In Congo, pharmacists and wholesalers threatened to strike over plans to freeze prices of 50 essential drugs and to fix profit margins for others.

UNICEF is lobbying CFA countries to promote generic drugs, but there is limited availability.

In Abidjan, the widely used malaria preventive sold under the trade name Paludrine jumped from 3,200 francs to 4,765 francs for 16 tablets after devaluation. The generic equivalent sells for about 400 CFA, but a reporter who visited 10 pharmacies in Abidjan could not find it--only Paludrine.

“We Francophones have not been used to buying from anywhere other than in France, where generic brands are not the policy,” said Christine Kouamelan, president of the National Syndicate of Private Pharmacists.

Some professionals say that the problem is another result of post-colonial dependence on Western nations.

“Its time Francophone countries came together to talk about manufacturing drugs instead of importing,” Kouamelan said.