029,
Welcome to "the search" for the mysteriously unavailable, sole antidepressant that I have found to be safe and effective. You might try calling Servier. Sometimes these companies will make statements by phone that they would not make in writing, but even that is rare. I called Servier Mexico, for example, to ask which pharmacies carried Stablon in Mexico. They told me that it had been phased out for sale in Mexico a few years ago when the Mexican government re-classified it into a more strict classification. That is very strange, given the wide range of drugs with strict classifications in the U.S. that are easily available from pharmacies in Mexico.
The idea that tianeptine could be a drug with high abuse potential flies in the face of everything that I have read (other than attempted IV use by a few druggies in Russia) and conflicts with my own experience.
I am tempted to think that this may be some sort of strategy to increase profits from a generic drug whose patent is long-expired. Maybe getting tianeptine classified into stricter categories makes it more difficult for competitors to enter certain national markets.
That logic would not appear to hold for Mexico, though, given that the drug is no longer even available there.
Nor would that be the case in the U.S., as I understand it. Whatever (generic) pharma company wants to spend the fortune for the approval process here can potentially get in. Once approved here, though, competitors can enter based upon the approval granted by the U.S. FDA for the drug itself. This makes it unlikely that any pharma company will want to be first. I suppose that a consortium of generic manufacturers could pool the substantial costs for the FDA-required trials.
From my limited research into suppliers, it appears that Servier may be transitioning manufacturing of tianeptine from Turkey to India under the "Serdia" subsidiary brand. That is mostly conjecture on my part, based upon seeing the Serdia brand pop up more often in online searches and the cutoff of supply from the Turkish online pharmacies. The few online pharmacies that offer it do so under the Serdia brand more often than not, where it has been repackaged to contain only ten pills per bubble strip instead of fifteen. It is being sold by the bubble strip rather than by the box, for 2-3 times the price; and the pharmacies appear shady in other respects.
Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.nobledrug...tablon_382.htmlAnother (independent) Indian manufacturer is Intas Biopharmaceuticals, whose brand of tianeptine is called "Tynept."
Edited by Bruce6815, 08 December 2012 - 11:17 AM.
LongeCity
