The Registrar of Medicine

Medicines Control Council

Dept. of Health, Pretoria

13 November 1997

Attention: Mrs. L. du Toit

Your letter of 3 November has reference. Whilst we appreciate an invitation to meet with the Council, the circumstances at hand render such an invitation insulting in the extreme.

PHARMAPACT has over this year lodged numerous serious objections to MCC activities and aspects of the proposed listing systems, in particular our letters of 16 January, 25 March and most recently 23 October 1997, all of which have been consistently ignored without consideration of our constitutional rights to adequate written responses and access to information required for the exercise of our legal and constitutional rights.

We are insulted by the expectation that false smiles, a cup of tea and a few Marie biscuits could possibly bridge the communication gap which the MCC has allowed to develop. We would minimally require legally and constitutionally acceptable replies to said correspondence as a starting point to bridge said gaps. Re-submitting our questions to which we demand answers would alone take at least the scheduled hour and the requisite replies several hours more, and in any event , we require written responses for the legal record.

Should Council see its way to instructing Professor Schlebusch to meet his aforementioned obligations, we will reconsider Council's offer, based on the adequacy or otherwise of said response, subject of course to Council's preparedness to set aside adequate time to settle unfinished business and its undertaking to meet our travel expenses.

The ball is now once again in Council's court and its response will determine the legal import of these matters iro which we reserve our rights.

Yours sincerely

Stuart Thomson

National Co-ordinator, PHARMAPACT

cc The Honourable Minister of Health

cc The Public Protector