Posted on 01/28/2005 8:00:54 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
When Congress passed landmark Medicare reforms last year, critics opposed a provision banning Americans from buying "Canadian" prescription drugs and a study of the safety and cost benefits of cross border purchasing was mandated in the legislation.
For several years, healthcare policy analysts and health safety experts have produced a cacophony of powerful objections to importation based on worries about safety and pricing. Now adding to the din of serious concern comes this study from the Department of Health and Human Services produced by a respected, international expert panel that not only highlights the dangers of importation, but is likely to shift the tide of the debate.
"Safe Importation" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to achieve, and any politician claiming that importation can be safe knowingly speaks an untruth. The HHS report now gives them little room to wiggle and even fewer places to hide.
Released in mid-December, the report provides irrefutable evidence that banning what consumers believe are "Canadian" drugs protects Americans from harm. The report also dispels another vote-garnering argument proffered by pro-importation politicians by casting doubt that Canadian drugs are cheaper.
In analyzing the effects of legalizing importation from non-U.S. sources, a critical finding of the study echoes concerns of importation opponents that drugs purchased from "Canada" are often not, in fact, Canadian.
As many as 70% of Internet websites that have the appearance of being in Canada, aren't. They are not peddling U.S.-made drugs returned from Canada. Their drugs are produced in unsafe, unsanitary facilities in places such as India, the Dominican Republic and Pakistan. They are either minimally effective or outright counterfeits with no active ingredients.
And the American patient ordering from his computer has little chance of detecting that his drugs come from foreign manufacturers or criminal counterfeiters.
Demonstrating its own concerns, Health Canada refuses to vouch for the quality of drugs that flow through Canada to the U.S. Its position is that the country receiving foreign prescription drugs bears responsibility for the quality of those drugs. The Canadian Government echoes the concerns of its Health Department and goes even further, questioning whether or not to continue allowing Canadian pharmacies to export drugs to the U.S. at all.
Canadian officials recognize that the drug supply of some 30 million Canadians cannot possibly fill the needs of nearly 300 million Americans. It recognizes that this supply deficit is a gilded invitation for bad actors to ramp up counterfeit drug importation schemes.
The Canadian Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, has repeatedly stated that Canada "cannot be the drugstore of the United States" and threatened to impose new regulations that would essentially bar the sales of actual Internet pharmacies by the end of January.
Legalizing importation would ensure that Americans take drugs from unknown sources for which nobody has taken responsibility. That, says the HHS report, is a prescription for disaster. "Many transactions," the report offers, "are occurring via poorly regulated and occasionally bogus Internet operations that have been documented ... to provide consumers with inferior products."
That prescription drugs from unverifiable sources are dangerous is no surprise. But few anticipated that the report would find that Canadian prescription drugs are not necessarily cheaper than their American counterparts.
"That most imported drugs are less expensive than American drugs is generally not true," the report states. It concluded that generic drugs, most widely used by Americans, are usually less expensive here in the U.S. and that lower prices can be found simply by shopping around or utilizing readily available prescription drug discount cards.
The study's authors contend that the enormous - and impossible - expense of screening imported drugs would more than offset any cost savings. "The public rightly expects that ... imported drugs [would] be safe and effective," they wrote. "Substantial resources would ... be needed to ensure adequate inspection of imported drug products."
The study raises yet another red flag for Americans seeking "Canadian" prescription drugs and confirms that there is no balance between safety and cost, no compromise appropriate. The U.S. has the safest drug supply in the world, and importing danger based on false cost concerns is simply not worth the risk.
HHS demonstrated once and for all that a Canadian drug cure-all is a hazardous myth. With such overwhelming evidence of the dangers inherent in legalizing importation, it is unconscionable that any politician would continue to play Russian roulette with the integrity of our medicine supply.
Bang?
We will just have to wait and see.
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Kerri Houston is Vice President of Policy for Frontiers of Freedom and Executive Director of its Project for the American Healthcare Century.
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
They are. And you can buy penicillin and sulfa drugs, which, if you know what you're doing, you could probably administer better than your local doc. But I wonder where they come from?
Alternatively, the drug companies would decide that selling at the Canadian government's price was no longer profitable (because it meant undercutting their own U.S. sales) and so they would tell the Canadians to either pay more or do without the drug.
Forget it; they threw that overboard years ago, once they seized control of power and money.
Just ask Bushie. See any limited government going on there? Or anywhere in Big Republican Government Land?
"Until there is some evidence that imported drugs are harming the health of Americans in considerable numbers, the case is still the null set to ban the imports. "
The whole issue of the importation of Canadian drugs is about to become irrelevant. The Canadian Government is considering legislation to ban cross border sales by direct purchase or through internet pharmacies not because Canadian drugs are unsafe but rather American prescriptions cannot be verified.
In Canada in order to get any prescription you have to visit a doctor and be determined by diagnosis in writing that you are suffering from a condition that the drug in question is considered a conventional treatment.
If you don't see a doctor registered to practice in the province you are living you don't get the prescription. It's as simple as that.
Regards,
Interesting FReeper comments bump!
May I encourage you to look no further than the price on any drug.
That way we will develop that body of statistical evidence even faster and you won't be around to bother us with nonsense.
Presumably there are third-worlders with enough sense to make sure they don't obtain inferior drugs from questionale vendors.
No doubt there are other third-worlders who are duped.
Shifting the base to where one's wife, presuming there's only been one wife, was made, is a non-sequitur and does nothing to advance the debate. Besides, there are no pictures so none of us are in a position to even hazard a guess as to her current condition, if any.
If you have a problem, what you need to do is lobby Congress to pass a law requiring somebody else to run and pay for them.
The value of medicines
A quarter of the world's top 100 medicines were discovered and developed in Britain, more than any country except the USA.
The industry invested £3.5billion in UK research and development in 2002 - nearly £10 million every day.
Pharmaceutical companies carry out nearly a quarter of all industrial research and development in the UK and spend more than a fifth of their turnover on R & D.
UK pharmaceutical industry exports in 2003 were an estimated £11.8 billion, creating a record trade surplus of £3.1 billion. Exports per employee in 2003 were around £150,000.
The pharmaceutical industry provides the nation's medicines to the NHS at a daily cost of just 40 pence per person - less than half of what we spend on alcoholic drinks.
Medicines account for only about 13 per cent of total NHS costs, despite a constant growth every year in the number of prescriptions issued.
http://www.abpi.org.uk/
There seems to be a myth that Europe does not do Pharma research.
Guess what we do! So does Japan and Canada.
Why should we accept such conditions in the manufacturing of drugs?
http://www.cordis.lu/eims/src/eims-r32.htm
This paper maps the recent innovation record of the European pharmaceutical industry vis-à-vis its US and Japanese counterparts. On the whole it is a story of success. German and Swiss chemical firms were amongst the world's first pharmaceutical manufacturers, establishing the tradition of a research-based industry. That tradition still survives, and although in the post-war world US multinationals came to dominate world markets, European companies have held their own and remain amongst world leaders with UK firms, in particular, rising up the rankings. A number of factors - the rising cost of R&D needed to meet regulatory requirements, the squeeze imposed on public health care budgets and the introduction of biotechnology - have combined to challenge the established routines of the industry in the 1980s. Firms have responded with a series of strategies - collaborations and alliances; mergers and attempts to develop new markets. The paper analyses the innovative performance and strategies adopted by different European firms in the face of these challenges. It examines different measures of innovation - R&D, patenting, the introduction of new chemical entities, and sales of top selling drugs - and finds none of them wholly satisfactory as a measure of innovation. In particular they fail to pick up new developments in biotechnology which is increasingly dominating routes to new drug discover and new treatments. The paper concludes that Europe's industry is at present holding its own through a mixture of collaboration and international merger. However, it is vital for the industry to be underpinned by a vibrant and creative science base if it is to meet the challenge of the coming decades.
It is because in the new version of "free" market capitalism the real persons deserving citizenship status, legal protection and limited personal liability are the corporations, CEOs and large shareholders. Regular customers, especially poorer should be disfranchised, shut up and be happy if paid for labor at Third Wolrd level.
Welcome to Latin America.
Sooner or later you will die.
"Do without the drug"? He, he. In a couple of weeks Canadians would make generic version at the 10% price. This would be much better for the American consumers, GO FOR IT!!!
wink wink, nudge nudge :)
Oh, so the unregulated market does not deliver? I wonder if all these illegal drugs from Afghanistan and Colombia are harmless fakes.
Are you proposing limits on food imports? I guess not since you freemarketeers care only for the profits of corporations.
I can assure you that the pharma lab even in a poor country WILL have the restroom and running water.
BTW, US corporations were helped by the confiscation of German patents, equipment and trademarks after the WWII. The main investment was done by the US taxpayers who paid for the war effort. Now they have to pay twice.
I am familiar with this concept.
I am not. So what about Europe- you could have less than 10% prices and they DO HAVE real restrooms and for the pharma people there are at least as clean and meticulous as Americans. "I am familiar with [that] concept" too.
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