A BLOCKCHAIN BASED FRAMEWORK TO MONITOR THE USE AND HANDLING OF THE CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES

Abstract

A controlled substance is a drug which is not legitimate, and which has damaging effect on mankind. National and state administration and governments take utmost care to regulate these controlled substances. But production or usage of these substances are not always illegal. Since these drugs are sometimes prescribed by medical practitioners for various genuine treatment purposes and are also available through pharmacies. All entities who manufacture, procure, distribute and sell the controlled substances have to send detailed reports to the Drug Enforcement Agencies (DEA) at regular intervals. Instead of different parties in the supply chain sending individual reports to the DEA, these movement of the controlled substances should be tracked in a Blockchain environment so that without the manual reporting from different sources a complete tamper proof history can be maintained. DEA would be able to get the full traceability of the controlled substances from the point of manufacturing to the point of consumption. This product lifecycle would be transparent to all the stakeholders in the supply chain to get better visibility about the source and end consumer of the product.