Drug Makers Keep Promise to Thwart Illegal Imports

American drug companies warned us that they weren’t just going to sit around doing nothing if more U.S. citizens started illegally importing drugs from Canada. Now, they are following through.

Canadian Press reported last week that three U.S. pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Co. and AstraZeneca PLC — have been cutting their shipments to Canadian pharmacies that have been shipping the drugs back into the United States.

For those who haven’t been following the issue, federal law bans the importation of drugs, but many people have been blatantly violating this law by ordering drugs from foreign countries over the Internet, or by driving to Canada and Mexico and smuggling drugs back.

Federal prosecutors haven’t done anything to stop the lawbreakers, so the practice has grown to the point where Canadian pharmacies are opening shops in this country to facilitate orders, and are advertising their wares in newspapers.

Even government agencies are promoting illegal purchases from Canada. Last week, the California Assembly’s Health Committee voted 13-4 in favor of requiring the state Department of Health Services to put links to Canadian pharmacies on its Web site.

The author of the bill, Assemblyman Dario Frommer, D-Glendale, said, “Today, California is joining other states who are empowering consumers to buy their prescription drugs from Canada, where the same drugs cost 40 percent to 75 percent less.”

Again, the purchases that Frommer is encouraging are illegal.

Frommer also oversimplifies the issue. Yes, brand-name prescription drugs cost less in Canada — in part because Canada’s overbearing government sets price controls that artificially keep costs down. In this country, we favor freedom, including free markets.

With the federal government doing nothing to stop the imports, and with many lawmakers becoming lawbreakers, the drug companies themselves are taking action. They monitored the sales of Canadian pharmacies and reduced shipments to pharmacies that have been shipping drugs across the border.

The lawbreaking pharmacies told Canadian Press that the reduced shipments won’t stop them. The pharmacies indicated they will maintain a steady supply by buying drugs from England, Ireland and New Zealand.

So if you’re ordering medicine from Canada, you really have no way of knowing where the drugs are really coming from. Nor will you have any idea of what sort of drug safety laws — if any — are enforced in the countries through which these drugs are traveling.

Have the drugs been stored properly in Ireland? Were they labeled properly in New Zealand? Were these sensitive chemical compounds kept at the proper temperature when they were shipped overseas and back? Negative answers could be a matter of life or death for the people swallowing the pills.

Yes, there are reasons that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has tight rules regarding the manufacturing and distribution of prescription drugs. It would be nice if the FDA would now take decisive action to enforce these rules, before drugs imported from who-knows-where start claiming lives.


David Kline is a Sacramento native who has been writing about seniors' issues since 1991. He has served as Spectrum's editor for the past five years — a period that has seen the paper receive awards from the California Newspapers Publishers' Association and National Mature Media Awards program.

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