Calcutta, April 26: A scarcity of morphine, which fetches low profits to suppliers but is essential for cancer patients in severe pain, has hit Calcutta because the government was slow to spot early signs of the crisis.

Morphine is the most affordable and effective sedative for cancer pain management. The alternatives are 10 times more expensive.

“There is a severe crisis of morphine,” admitted Sanchita Bakshi, the state’s director of health services.

Low profits are apparently discouraging drug manufacturers and wholesalers from supplying morphine. A strip of ten 10mg morphine tablets brings a profit of not more than Rs 5, a stockist said.

Some suppliers also cited stringent excise department rules and paperwork hassles for not stocking the drug. Morphine manufacturers and wholesalers need special permission from the excise department to get the raw materials as well as the finished products from outside the state.

“Wholesalers can only supply it to institutes and retailers with an excise licence. For every purchase, the retailer or the institute and wholesaler have to procure a fresh permission. This is a big hassle,” said Kajal Gomes, a wholesaler.

A retailer has to keep detailed records of the buyer and submit them to the excise department.

“The last time the tenders for morphine were floated, none of the manufacturers took part in the bid,” said Chandan Sen, the director of the Central Medical Stores.

At the major cancer hospitals in the city, morphine stocks have completely dried up.

“The stocks were exhausted a few weeks ago. We are using other painkillers for terminally ill patients, but they are not very effective,” said Saroj Gupta, the director of the Cancer Centre Welfare Home and Research Institute, Thakurpukur.

At the Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Institute, the situation is worse. The institute has not updated the permission from the excise department for stocking morphine. “It needs a full team to look after the process of buying, stocking and distributing morphine. We will get the permission renewed soon,” said J. Biswas, its director.

Badal Pradhan, 52, a musician attached to the Sangeet Research Academy who is in an advanced stage of pancreas cancer, has not slept properly over the past two weeks, unable to get a single dose of morphine.

Sources at AMRI, the only private hospital in the city with a radiotherapy unit apart from the one at Thakurpukur, also admitted that there was a crisis.

Surgical oncologist Gautam Mukhopadhyay said two-thirds of cancer patients need morphine at some stage or the other.

Calcutta is the only city in eastern India offering speciality cancer treatment. Around 12,000 cancer cases are reported in the city every year.

“Alternative drugs are out of most people’s reach. So, in most cases, patients have been suffering till they die,” Mukhopadhyay said.

Several other states, a Bengal official said, have been able to avert the crisis by laying a condition for morphine manufacturers and wholesalers — to sell high-profit drugs, they have to supply morphine.

Officials at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, and Christian Medical College, Vellore, said they had no morphine crisis there.

Asked what the Bengal government was planning to do, a senior official said: “We are talking to all concerned.”