It is not weird that followers of political parties in Lebanon take advantage of their party affiliations and the ruling authority to pass deals and facilitate their work!

It is not strange for parties to fight for their partisans to reach positions in the state to implement corruption.

The former Head of the Order of Pharmacists, Rabih Hassouneh is one example. He belongs politically to the Future Movement and at the same time owns pharmaceutical warehouses. In the recent raids conducted by the Minister of Public Health, Hamad Hassan, thousands of cancer needles were found hidden in Macromed warehouse in Ain al-Mraiseh, while cancer patients were terrified of the lack of treatment. Hassouneh turned from the Head of the Order of pharmacists into a monopolist, and he was dubbed a ‘murderous criminal’.

In 2015, the head of the Order of Pharmacists, Hassouneh, explained in a press interview the vital role the pharmacists play. He described the pharmacist as a health security man who is keen for the patient’s health and providing safe medicine, without any commercial consideration, forgetting in 2021 that he was a pharmacist before he was a merchant and a monopolist.

Hassouneh ran for the parliamentary elections in 2018 as a candidate of “Future Movement”, and he was among Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s team.

From the humanitarian profession as a pharmacist to the political paths, quotas, and mafias. The Financial Prosecutor, Judge Ali Ibrahim, accused Hassouneh with the crime of monopoly as well as money laundering.

When he was the Head of Order of Pharmacists in 2015, he denounced in another interview the decision to license five new faculties of pharmacy, as this step leads to an increase in the number of graduates, as the ratio of pharmacists to every citizen is 4 times the global average.

Today, we assure Hassouneh that thanks to him and to others similar to him, pharmacists emigrated from Lebanon and a large number of them were intimidated due to the shortage of medicines.

The pharmacist’s message: “The pharmacist’s profession is a message that is never in the face of the poor and the sick. When I was Head of the Order, one of my most important achievements is how to preserve the poor to obtain medicine,” he said with all innocence in an interview on Tele Liban.