On Tuesday, approximately 2,500 new items from the range of medicines, such as painkillers and some dietary supplements, appeared in the online offer of dm drugstore in Germany. People in Germany still have to go to a pharmacy for prescription drugs. According to the management of the company dm, which is based in Karlsruhe in the south-west of Germany, this is a “logical extension of the product range”. According to him, customers often looked for over-the-counter medicines on the website.
dm will deliver ordered medicines without a prescription to customers in Germany via a logistics center in the Czech Republic, thus bypassing the ban on the sale of medicines in Germany outside of pharmacies. In the Czech Republic, the company therefore established a pharmacy in the Nová Hospoda u Boru industrial zone in western Bohemia. He will send medicines to Germany from it.
“In case of questions about the offered product range, pharmacies and pharmacists who speak German are available to customers,” the press release states.
The station n-tv pointed out that other online platforms such as Shop Apotheke and Doc Morris, which chose the Netherlands, already use the possibility of sending medicines from abroad.
The German Association of Pharmacists has warned that people with health problems could be confused if the difference between a pharmacy and a drugstore is not clear. According to him, highly effective and therefore potentially dangerous drugs should only be available in pharmacies with trained staff who can advise on exactly which drugs to use in case of acute problems.
The head of dm Christoph Werner called the criticism bizarre in an interview with the Handelsblatt newspaper. “We see a lot of potential,” he added. According to the Datamed IQ market research institute, the over-the-counter medicine market in Germany recorded a turnover of more than 14 billion euros last year, equivalent to about 340 billion crowns.
