Op-eds: Canadian and American regulators, law enforcement and patient advocates oppose drug importation
Since 2000, every head of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has opposed drug importation because the benefits that might be gained are far outweighed by the many dangers. Law enforcement, patient advocates, pharmacy groups, and regulators agree.
In this October 10, 2018 editorial for The Hill, publishing executive warns that America has nothing to gain and everything to lose if we forsake our secure drug supply chain for allowing the importation of dangerous drugs…
In this September 17, 2018, editorial for The Detroit News, the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest’s President and co-founder Peter Pitts warned that legalizing prescription drug importation will not generate massive savings for U.S. citizens while also potentially exposing millions of Americans to dangerous counterfeit drugs…
There are certainly things we can learn from other countries’ healthcare successes, but importation is not the right approach.
This distressing situation shows that deadly fentanyl analogues are killing Americans who are using laced non-opioid prescriptions.
In this August 21, 2018 editorial for the Havre Daily News Canada Border Services Agency and the Ontario Provincial Police veteran Don Bell talks about the need for Canada and the United States to work together to combat counterfeit drugs.
On August 8, 2018, the National Sheriffs’ Association wrote the President to oppose prescription drug importation. Importing drugs from other countries, they say, “jeopardizes law enforcement’s ability to protect the public health and endangers the safety of law enforcement and other first responders.”
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.
The impact on Canada’s health care system could be devastating. In the aftermath of a previous American proposal, a 2010 study on the potential effects of exporting Canada’s drug supply to the US concluded that “if 10% of the US prescriptions were filled from Canadian sources (manufacturer, wholesale or retail), Canada’s 2007 drug supply would be exhausted in 224 days.”
A 2018 follow-up study reached similar conclusions. Such studies are all but ignored by US clinicians who urge importing drugs from Canada, and who are strangely oblivious to the fact that supplying an American patient could mean taking that same drug away from someone who needs it in Canada.
In this August 9, 2018 editorial for RealClearMarkets, Bill Martinez reminds Americans that the FDA hasn’t yet approved importation for a reason: it’s impossible to open the floodgates to foreign drug imports without cutting corners on safety.
In this August 1, 2018 editorial for Inside Sources, National Association of Boards of Pharmacy Director Carmen Catizone raises the alarm about ICANN’s proposed changes to the WHOIS system, a database that identifies the owners of web domains. These changes are meant to bring WHOIS in compliance with new European privacy laws but, he warns, they would also impede law enforcement and others’ efforts to “connect the dots and link up different websites run as part of large criminal enterprises” like drug counterfeiting rings.