What medicines do U.S. states want to import from Canada’s drug supply?
Download our list of drug lists from all state importation applications.
This is a living document maintained by the Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM). Within it, you will find a collection of all the drug lists from known drug importation applications (SIPs), including previous versions superseded by subsequent filings.
In 2003, the Medicare Modernization Act included a provision to allow states to import prescription drugs from Canada as long as doing so would not endanger patients and that it would give significant savings to the American consumer. A federal rule was not finalized until 2020. That finalized rule can be seen here and it governs the requirements of any state’s application to the FDA to operate a program to import medicine from Canada. As part of a Section 804 program application, a state needs to provide a list of drugs they seek to import.
Methods
The drug lists were collected in one of three ways:
- A state publicly published the SIP application containing the drug list
- PSM obtained the information through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
- The information was obtained from public evidence from ongoing litigation.
Notes
As of January 29, 2024, legislators in Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, and Vermont have drafted applications though not all to the same level of detail. To the best of PSM’s knowledge, Connecticut, Maine, Texas, and Vermont have not submitted drug lists. If/when a state does, that information will be included in this document.
SIP applications included in this document are:
- Colorado: February 2024, December 2022, and March 2020
- Florida: November 2023, October 2023, April 2023, November 2021, September 2021, April 2021, and November 2020.
- New Hampshire: April 2021
- New Mexico: December 2020 and October 2020
Download our list of drug lists from all state importation applications.
Living document change log:
- April 15, 2024: information from Florida's November 16, 2023 updated SIP application was added to this document
- February 27, 2024: information from Colorado's February 27, 2024 updated SIP application was added to this document