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Bosnia During the civil war in Bosnia so much unwanted drugs were dumped that the government were forced to pay $34 million to build an incinerator just to dispose of them. One charity we spoke to, Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres, said that they had to spend £100,000 in the town of Mostar alone disposing of these drugs in lime filled buckets. The situation prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to issue a set of guidelines on best practice for good donations which stated that drugs have a shelf life of at least one year, that they should be no returned samples and that they should be requested.
Albania - 1999 Since then, the situation has not improved. We spoke to a woman who was involved in sorting out drugs in Albania in 1999. She told us of a hospital in Tirana which had received tonnes of drugs, shown below.
She also discovered sadly that of all the tonnes of drugs donated, only a small proportion could actually be termed useful, shown below.  Americares We got hold of an internal WHO report which studied drug donations in Albania in 1999. It documented several donations that were “conspicuous by their size and inappropriateness”, one of which was a donation from American Home Products via a charity called Americares, of painkillers which had only 5 months left before it expired. American Home Products has since changed its name to Wyeth and we thought that seeing as Wyeth were so found of giving, we’d respond in kind. We got 450,000 US coins (a ton in weight) in a flat bed truck and drove them to Wyeth’s UK headquarters. Mark then donated these coins to Wyeth. 
True enough, Americares did so and said that the Albanian Ministry of Health were aware that the drugs were short dated before they were sent and still said they were needed. Thinking we needed a bit of insight into why the Albanians would do this we spoke to Claudi Curchillo again from Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres about what he thought their reasons could be. Claudi said in his experience countries would not refuse any donations for fear of offending the donor and also in case this would mean they wouldn’t make any future donations which could include drugs that were badly needed.
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