Do you know your Crocin from Crocin Advance or Disprin from Disprin Plus?

Quite likely you did not notice the difference, or the increased price. After all, prices are increasing on all household items, so even if you noticed your chemist taking Rs 20 from you for a 10-tablet strip of Crocin Advance, compared to about ₹10 for the regular Crocin, you may have blamed it on inflation.

The story here, though, is quite different.

In the early 2000s, Disprin, the popular water-dissolvable aspirin, was replaced with a paracetamol formulation, with the addition of “Plus” to its branding.

Disprin Plus (paracetamol) replaced Disprin (aspirin) in the market. So what’s the fuss over a name? Well, doctors often prescribe aspirin as a blood thinner, while a paracetamol is taken to treat pain. So a change in name could mislead a heart patient, who takes what he believes is an aspirin (blood thinner), but in fact ends up taking a paracetamol (for pain) – a mistake that could set him up for a serious cardiac event.

The Central pricing authority took a serious view of this change as it came at a time when aspirin brands went off the market, since the drug was under price control and companies did not find it viable to make the medicine.

Reckitt Benckiser, the company caught with its shoe on the wrong foot regarding Disprin, did try to communicate the medicine brand change to consumers through advertisements. But with consumers obviously not getting the intricacies involved, the company had to bring back Disprin (aspirin), given the serious danger of wrong medication.

More effective?

In Crocin’s case, the advance version claimed to be a locally researched paracetamol, and five times more effective in ridding you of your headache. But in markets such as Maharashtra, Crocin Advance was made available, even as the regular and less priced Crocin was not.

Someone was watching. The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration questioned GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare (which sells paracetamol under the brand name Crocin), on the higher price. The State regulator saw this as a move to avoid price control, as paracetamol comes under the Central government’s price control list, and should have been selling at half the price (at about Rs 10 for 10 tablets).

To cut a long story short, the Centre cast its lot with the State authority and GSK will now sell its advance version of Crocin at the reduced price.

GSK’s reasoning about why it sold its advance version at double the price – the drug was locally researched, and it relieved aches and pains five times faster. And just as you pay higher prices for a better service, so too for a more effective medicine.

The Crocin incident has immediate recall, as it happened earlier this month. But these two instances are not the only ones. Drug companies are known to tweak products to skirt price control. Of course, they will never admit this and will explain it to you saying their new medicine is a better version. They may be right in some cases, but that’s for the drug regulators to counter-check and call their bluff, if indeed there is one, in the interest of the unsuspecting pill-popping consumer.

Vitamin C is a weekly dose of consumer empowerment.

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