Medicine Importation Legislation is a Smuggler’s Dream

This editorial by Curtis Ellis was published in WND on July 13, 2018.

Bernie's Opioid Importation Facilitation Act

While the Trump administration works to stem the raging epidemic of opioid addiction, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has a plan to make it worse.

He calls it the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, S. 469. This legislation would open our borders to the free flow of drugs – all drugs – from Canada and other countries.

It would be more accurate to call it the Unsafe Opioid Importation Facilitation Act – and we can’t afford it.

Sanders is still peddling the bogus line that importing prescription drugs from Canada is the ticket to lower health-care bills for Americans.

Not only has Bernie’s tonic been exposed as a fraud, it is downright deadly.

First, the fraud: Canada can only get away with imposing government price controls on prescription drugs because there are few Canadians, and pharmaceutical companies can make up the money they lose in Canada by selling their products for more in other larger markets, such as, say, the United States. One doesn’t need a degree in economics to understand this.

An honest socialist, democratic or otherwise, would openly demand prescription drug price controls be imposed right here in the U.S. Instead, Bernie outsources that job to the Canadian government. That way he can avoid an argument he knows he’d lose and disguise his socialist quackery as a magic cure-all for everything that ails you, delivered to your doorstep via FedEx.

But more than just defraud you, Bernie’s medicine will also kill you.

These days, the most popular drug from online pharmacies is not Humira, Lipitor or Nexium – it’s fentanyl: cheap, extremely powerful synthetic heroin made in China, ordered online and available without a prescription.

Three milligrams of fentanyl – three one-thousandths of a gram – is enough for a fatal overdose. One kilo (2.2 pounds) pressed into counterfeit pills will yield a profit of $10 million on the street. Its concentrated punch makes fentanyl ideal to ship via mail – and that’s how it’s been getting into Canada and the U.S.

Canadian authorities have launched dozens of investigations involving vendors shipping fentanyl by mail, and they are busy identifying the best way to flag parcels arriving from China.

Now, the Mexican drug cartels have now gotten in on the action too, using New York as a distribution hub for their deadly goods. The NYPD recently seized 64 kilos of fentanyl – enough to kill 32 million people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Bernie’s legislation to increase the cross-border flow of pharmaceuticals is a prescription for more fatal opioid overdoses, not fewer.

Our neighbor to the north is a major transshipment point for fentanyl entering the U.S., so it would be bad enough if the Sanders plan only applied to Canada. But it doesn’t.

Bernie’s Opioid Importation Facilitation Act also opens our border to more drugs from Mexico.

His legislation would permit importing drugs not just from Canada, but also from any of the 34 countries that are members of the globalist Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. The OECD includes Mexico.

The Sanders legislation is a smuggler’s dream come true. It traffics in globalism, putting one of our key industries at the mercy of the OECD. It smuggles socialist-style government price controls into the U.S. And it will smuggle more deadly opioids into communities across our country.