The bills before Congress would remove many of the license and oversight requirements on the drugs imported into the United States by lifting those barriers, inviting an influx of bogus pharmaceutical products from the same crime rings that are selling these drugs in other countries around the world that would love better access to the U.S. market.
Law enforcement would inevitably be tasked with policing the problem, at a time when most prosecutors and law enforcement officials have their hands full with the growing opioid crisis. One of the biggest killers is fentanyl, a potent, synthetic opioid pain medication that is being laced into counterfeit pills.
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A 47-year-old Houston woman appeared in federal court in June 2017 to face charges for allegedly smuggling a counterfeit drug into the U.S. and trafficking it through her weight loss and nutrition store located in a west Houston strip mall.
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A new survey conducted by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) has found that a majority of Americans are in the dark when it comes to dangers posed by unlicensed online pharmacies.
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Cincinnati resident Shoaib Haroon was recently sentenced to five years in federal prison for his role in a scheme to sell people counterfeit drugs. Mr. Haroon received and filled the orders out of his home. He was observed mailing 80 packages each day out of the same post office. Inside the packages were counterfeit pills in plastic bags.
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The National Post reports that since October 2015, Health Canada has stopped almost 10,000 packages containing counterfeit prescription drugs at the Canadian border. New reports from a 2010 incident reveal that counterfeit drugs ended up in 260 pharmacies and four hospitals in Australia. Patients were protected by a thorough hospital pharmacist who noticed “it was grittier than normal.”
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Counterfeit Altuzan, known as Avastin in the U.S., resurfaces in Cyprus and India four years after FDA reported U.S. doctors purchasing it.
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Freeh warned that allowing drug importation from Canada was akin to allowing drugs to be imported from anywhere. Quality would be at risk, and the opioid crisis, an epidemic that killed over 33,000 Americans in 2015, would only get worse. He said that allowing drug importation, “…will not only fuel that, but it will also, in my opinion, encourage a lot of criminal groups and organizations that heretofore have not been involved in this trade, but will see huge opportunities to enter the market.”
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A few years ago, Maine introduced similar legislation that allowed patients to buy drugs from foreign pharmacies. We, too, wanted to provide patients with lower-cost medicines.
It proved to be a big mistake. Instead of getting drugs from Canada, we got dangerous and ineffective counterfeit pills from other countries. Maine’s disastrous experience with counterfeit Canadian drug imports should serve as a lesson to our lawmakers to say no to drug importation legislation.
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During my law enforcement career, spanning four decades, I have spent a great deal of time investigating crimes related to illegal drug use and trafficking. The growing scourge of methamphetamine and opioid use is unlike other crimes I have prosecuted in the past. It has literally changed the way we protect our citizens and officers. In addition to the traditional equipment carried by an officer, they must now equip themselves with Naloxone to counteract the effects of an opioid overdose, thusly, amending our existing policies has become necessary.
Read MoreIn the midst of a nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction fueled by illicit smuggling of drugs from overseas, and coming on the heels of a year in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized over $73 million worth of counterfeit medicines at our nation’s ports, some members of Congress have suggested a novel approach to these growing threats: “opening the floodgates.”
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