Importation Has Some Huge Risks

There are certainly things we can learn from other countries’ healthcare successes, but importation is not the right approach.

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Drug Importation is Fraught with Peril

As a licensed pharmacist, I’m all too familiar with patients’ difficulties getting medications they need and their physician has prescribed. As baby boomers age, pharmacists see more patients at our counters unable to obtain needed treatments for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. This issue is now being acknowledged and a healthy debate has begun over possible solutions. But one idea policymakers shouldn’t pursue is opening up our country’s secure drug supply to medicines coming from outside our borders.

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Between 2007 and 2018 Foreign Wholesalers Sold American Doctors Unreliable Black Market Cancer Drugs

From 2007 to 2018 American physicians and clinics demonstrated that drug importation is not safe and is extremely difficult to make safe. Doctors thought they were saving money. Instead they purchased illegally imported, expired, damaged and outright counterfeit medications—including cancer treatments—from black market wholesalers posing as licensed distributors in Canada and other countries.

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Partnership for Safe Medicines Statement on FDA Working Group on Drug Importation

Washington (July 19, 2018) – Shabbir Imber Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, released the following statement regarding today’s announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services to create a drug importation working group at FDA: “We are deeply concerned about today’s announcement, particularly given the deaths of Americans in at…

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Medicine Importation Legislation is a Smuggler’s Dream

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. Read more…

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