FDA takes its war on imported drugs to New England
The FDA doesn't want Americans to buy cheap drugs from Canada. I don't understand this position. I don't understand it at all.
The FDA has repeatedly argued that buying drugs from Canada is illegal and risky because it cannot guarantee the safety and dosages of imported products or Internet sales.
So we're arguing that Canadians have unsafe drugs? We're arguing that Celebrex manufactured by Pfizer and sold in the United States is safer than Celebrex manufactured by Pfizer in the same plant and sold in Canada?
Are we stupid? Do we think Canadian pharmacies are somehow filthy, disgusting, germ factories, full of sinister Manitobans gleefully adulterating pills? Do we enjoy insulting Canadians?
Maybe we think the Canadian equivalent of the FDA is corrupt and incompetent, incapable of effectively regulating the healthfulness and purity of drugs. Maybe our FDA looks around at how they themselves do business and think "Christ, if we're so in the bag to the drug companies, imagine how bad the Canadians must be?"
Meanwhile, the FDA wants the help of credit-card and package delivery companies to slow the importation of prescription drugs.Agency officials said they want to meet with the companies to explore whether they would voluntarily limit business with foreign pharmacies that ship prescription drugs to the United States.
I can imagine how that conversation must have gone. Because, sure, credit-card companies that make their money helping people buy things are going to cooperate in preventing people from buying things, and package delivery companies that make their money taking packages from place to place are going to cooperate by not taking packages from place to place.
Y'know, maybe it's just me. I have a dirty, low-down suspicious mind. But this looks like the Bush administration is just making another attempt to funnel money from Americans to corporations. Look, guys, you Republicans are supposed to believe in the power of the market, right? Why don't you let the market work instead of engaging in all of these government price supports? The one thing the pharmaceutical companies don't need is government price supports; they've been doing a bang-up job keeping the prices up themselves.
Would Ronald Reagan have led a Republican Party that imposed price supports?
Posted by Greg at December 17, 2003 10:30 AM
Quote:
"Are we stupid? Do we think Canadian pharmacies are somehow filthy, disgusting, germ factories, full of sinister Manitobans gleefully adulterating pills? Do we enjoy insulting Canadians?"
Er, no. Well, yes, but no.
We think that Mexican pharmacies are certainly guilty of doctoring pills and processing prescriptions unsafely because we've caught some of them at it. We are concerned that the same sorts of things might be happening in Canada, and also the Bahamas, Haiti and other places conveniently close to the United States. Wherever the reach of American law does not extend, the FDA has no way of knowing whether drugs are being appropriately processed and dispensed. And since we expect the FDA to be in the business of being *absolutely sure* about everything Americans put in their bodies, they're pretty much just doing their job.
I'll turn it around: what is it about the Canadians that you find *less* suspicious than a drug-dispensing shack in Tijuana? is this an anglo thing?
Andy's right, but he's also wrong.
There's a huge difference between the hurdles for a TN visa for a Mexican and a TN visa for a Canadian. Racist and wrong? Maybe. But historically we've also had more problems on the Mexican border than the Canadian one.
I suspect the same thing is true of drug adulteration, too.
It's not an Anglo thing at all; it's a wealth thing. I'd expect the pills dispensed at a Japanese pharmacy to be just as good as American pills, but I'd be leery of Mexican, Haitian, or Romanian pills.
Canada's not a third-world country governed by graft. It's a civilized country governed by rule of law, the effectiveness of whose FDA-equivalent is certainly determinable.
Hi, I work for a Canadian online pharmacy, and I can assure you that all of our drugs are 100% safe. All of our brand name drugs are manufactured in the U.S. by the large drug companies and then sent to our pharmacy here. We then send them right back to the U.S. at savings ranging from 40-90%. The drugs produced here are generic drugs. The generic drugs are also 100% safe and are identical to the brand name equivalents. The drug manufacturing industry here is regulated by Health Canada, Canada's FDA equivalent. The Governor of Illinois recently toured one of these manufacturing plants in Alberta, and he said that Health Canada's guidelines are actually more stringent than the FDA's.
The safety of drugs coming out of Mexico, Haiti or other third-world countries is definetly an issue. The safety of drugs from Canada is definetly not. The U.S. Government, the FDA and the large drug companies decided to make it an issue by grouping us with the above-mentioned countries. This was a clear attempt to dissuade individuals from getting their prescriptions filled in Canada. Be wary of sites which claim to be based in Canada, yet do not print their address or Canadian license number. These are the only Canadian pharmacies you need to be worried of, the ones not based in Canada.
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Thank You