Enlarge / A woman wearing a face mask leaves a pharmacy in the town of Podolsk some 40 kilometers outside Moscow on November 12, 2021. (credit: Getty | YURI KADOBNOV )
As Western countries continue to ratchet up sanctions and boycotts against Russia, the country’s citizens are panic-buying medicines, such as antidepressants, sleeping pills, and contraceptives, according to Reuters.
Between February 28 and March 13, Russians bought 270.5 million pharmaceutical items worth about $104 billion, according to sales data compiled for the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. That two weeks’ worth of buying was comparable to what Russians bought at pharmacies for the entire month of January, which saw purchases of 280 million pharmaceutical items worth about $100 billion.
The analysis, carried out by Russian analytics company DSM Group, found that demand increased sharply for medicines, including antidepressants, sleeping pills, insulin, cancer and heart drugs, hormones, and contraceptives.
