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Neither is there anything unique about the safety issue with drugs either. A large percentage of the products we import are potentially dangerous. When we import a shank of New Zealand lamb or a Mercedes, we need to be concerned about product safety. Many products need to be tariffed and inspected, but we still routinely import them. The one exception is medications.

A manufactured good has a place of origin which can be traced. The safety of an entire product line can be appraised from a fraction of the whole lot. If a portion of the line is defective in some way, other units can be identified as potentially defective and recalled.

Food items lie somewhere between pharmaceuticals and manufactured goods. Appropriately, importation of food is restricted somewhat less than drugs, but more than most other products. Beef, for instance, has posed a particularly significant health risk in recent years and its import has been limited by point of origin.

Your comparison is misleading because drugs are unique among products. It is not the case that all drugs used in this country must be manufactured here. If a pharmaceutical company makes their product somewhere else it can usually be brought here, subject to quality control similar to domestic drugs. What is currently banned is reimportation -- import of drugs which are not factory-direct, that have exchanged hands several times and have not been monitored for tampering in that in-between time. It is simple to turn a profit by adulterating them in some way, actual concentration and date of expiration is easily disguised, and it is difficult distinguish the origin of one lot of a drug when compared to another.

Now it might be fair to reimport drugs with inspection. However, in my own opinion, anything less than an assay of every single reimported unit would be inadequate.

What is currently banned is reimportation -- import of drugs which are not factory-direct, that have exchanged hands several times and have not been monitored for tampering in that in-between time. It is simple to turn a profit by adulterating them in some way, actual concentration and date of expiration is easily disguised, and it is difficult distinguish the origin of one lot of a drug when compared to another.

See! It's not that Big Pharma really gives a crap about your safety, which is their stated excuse for keeping imports illegal. What concerns them most is reimportation of their own product sold at lower prices elsewhere in the world. As one of the sources quoted in the article says, if imported medications are so dangerous, where are all the dead Canadians?

In this state, we're fortunate enough to live near a border. Low-cost drugs are a bus ride away. Busing retired geezers from Sun City to pharmacies in Nogales is huge business, and local politicians know not to mess with the massive retired vote. Buying anything in Mexico is notoriously iffy, but over the years we have developed a set of sources we can rely on. But you shouldn't have to be gay or live on the border to get affordable drugs. Open markets should be a basic right of all Americans.