ADANA — “They are out," said the father of a sick 4-year-old boy to his wife on the phone at a small pharmacy in Turkey’s southern province of Adana. He was desperate to find antibiotics for his son just a few days after a plane carrying 250,000 bottles of children's pain and fever relief medication from Turkey arrived in Canada to relieve the North American country of its drug shortage.

“Of course, I’m angry at the government,” Yusuf Hakverdi told Al-Monitor. “We went to four different pharmacies to find antibiotics. What good is the government?” he vehemently asked, adding that this was not the first time he was returning home empty-handed from a medicine hunt over the past year, echoing the outrage of millions. 

Hakverdi’s struggle is shared by millions of Turks today who search pharmacy by pharmacy to find basic medicines for themselves or their loved ones amid Turkey's ongoing drug shortage crisis, which pharmacists' chambers say is a global problem worsened in Turkey with the lira’s devaluation, poor policy-making and especially the government-imposed euro-lira conversion rate, which still remains well below the real euro-Turkish lira parity.

In response to growing public unease, the Turkish government last month suspended the export of drugs that are considered “rare” until the countrywide problem is tackled. It also raised the euro-lira rate for imported medicine prices by 36.77% to 10.8 lira per euro last month in what Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said was the "first step for the solution of the medicine shortage in the market.”