Editorial - Foreign drugs meet a need that U.S. has ignored
Five years ago, U.S. residents who bought lower-priced prescription drugs from Canada were mainly seniors along the border who made bus trips in search of affordable medicines. Today, the practice is a booming, if illegal, business. About 1 million U.S. consumers buy Canadian drugs, and dozens of storefronts have sprung up from California to Massachusetts offering to arrange purchases that now exceed $1 billion a year.
The willingness of so many individuals and last month, even the Springfield, Mass., municipal government to defy a federal law against buying foreign drugs dramatizes the growing rebellion over a system that forces U.S. consumers to pay the highest drug prices in the world.
Even if the House and Senate can agree on the specifics of a Medicare drug benefit for seniors when Congress reconvenes next month, it won't help the millions of others who can't afford needed medicines.
Yet instead of working on constructive ways to address the problem, the drug industry and its richly rewarded political allies in Washington are fighting grassroots solutions such as Canadian purchases. Among the industry's obstructionist tactics: Pfizer, the world's largest drugmaker, last week became the latest supplier to limit or cut off sales of its products to Canadian pharmacies that continue filling U.S. orders.
Under industry pressure, the Food and Drug Administration is threatening legal action against for-profit or volunteer groups that help patients fill out forms to meet Canada's prescription requirements.
Programs launched by states to reduce the cost of drugs for their residents have been tied up in lawsuits by the industry. The industry says its large profit margins finance the costly development of new drugs, which could not be funded under the government price controls imposed in Canada and most other industrial countries. The industry is correct about the importance of funding research. Yet its big profits also funded the $26 million in political donations that drugmakers made in the last election. And they paid the salaries of 600 lobbyists who are fighting efforts to expand the federal government's power to negotiate lower drug prices.
The FDA says foreign drugs are more likely to be unsafe or counterfeit. Yet while some foreign purchases entail greater risks, the Congressional Research Service concluded in 2001 and again this year that drug-safety rules in Canada are at least as strong as those in the U.S. No cases of counterfeit drugs have surfaced in Canada for more than a decade. Even Congress is belatedly recognizing that buying drugs from Canada can make sense. In a setback for the industry and House GOP leaders, 87 Republicans voted with 155 Democrats on July 25 to legalize drug purchases from Canada and 24 other nations with high quality-control standards.
Clearly, filling prescriptions in Canada is not a long-term solution to the problem of drug affordability in the USA. For one thing, Canada's supply network is much too small to meet the huge potential demand from south of the border.
But until the industry and Washington tackle the problem, they can't be surprised that Canadian drug purchases are a popular temporary solution for U.S. consumers.
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