Overview of prosecution against illegal drugs and cosmetics by pharmacy enforcement branch (PEB) in Sarawak Malaysia

Prosecutes the offenders in the court in accordance to the laws and regulations enforce with the firm penalty is upmost important to assure our laws and regulations were intact. This raises our interest to fill the knowledge gap on the prosecution successful rate, and the intensity of fines imposes serve as an indicator or baseline to an evaluation of the effectiveness of enforcement activities. This is a cross-sectional retrospective study where data were collected from the Sarawak state PEB prosecution reports from 1st January 2014 to 31st December 2016. Descriptive statistics, in numbers and percentages, were used to present the prevalence of cases prosecuted by PEB and its successful rate, while Kruskal Wallis Test was used to compare the median of the fines (2014-2016). Prosecution successful rate was found to improve from 52.6% (2014) to 62.8 (2015) and further increased to 69.4% (2016) due to the high plead guilty rate. This reflected that the intensity of the penalty imposed was not sufficient. Median of the penalties for the top 3 offences (Ranging RM1000-RM3000 throughout the study period) prosecuted shown to be statistically insignificant throughout the study periods, even though we observed the increased frequency of the cases charged. This study serves as a baseline which provides valuable insights to policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders in determining the intensity of penalty and the necessity reformulating our existing laws and regulations.