The Senate is voting on whether to allow Canadian imports. Buying the same thing cheaper, who could object? You should. Here's why:
Canada can't supply us with drugs, they don't have the quantity or the laws to do it.
Drug companies can stop imports without a law, so we're back where we started.
Most importantly, if the pet food from a foreign country kills living things, why would you buy your drugs there?
The answer is at home, for the industry to heed the words in a video speech by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., in which he urged attendees to "lead in compassion as we have led in innovation."
In Canada, pharmacists generally must have a true pharmacist-patient relationship with their health care provider. They aren't supposed to be writing scripts for US customers. Also, drug companies have become wise to this scheme, and are only selling enough drugs in Canada for the current Canadian population. They are forbidding increases in orders. The American market is doubling, quadrupling, and increasing demand even more, and it can't be met. Finally, when RFID implementation is complete, it will be used to strictly control inventory, including inventory diverted from Canadian customers.
Canada has it's own price controls. Provinces act as insurance companies and negotiate prices. If they don't reach an agreement, the drug does not go on the provincial formulary. We could do that here, if we want to create a formulary or are willing to pay the difference.
Most important is safety. Congress says it's so worried about safety that even though the problem is clearly one of resources -- FDA's budget is smaller than the school system of the county it sits in -- the current bill piles on more work for FDA staff with inadequate resources. The current FDA reform proposal would require companies to conduct -- and FDA to review -- risk assessments for their drugs, which can be expensive and time consuming, and have little benefit for the delay they would cause, especially for drugs used for life-threatening illnesses.
The proposal also would require post-marketing studies, which are now optional. FDA can ask for them if needed. Again, FDA would need staff to review these massive paper exercises. Post marketing studies using patients from other countries, if they are done at all, can't take into account American diet, drinking habits, and lack of exercise. An Asian diet high in fish oils, and a Mediterranean diet high in fiber from year-round fruits and vegetables, react with drugs and patients very differently from the US high-fat diet.
So why should a company perform a risk assessment when they must compete with drugs from China, which don't even have to have the ingredients claimed on the label? How can a company conduct a real post-marketing study when some of the drugs are likely to be counterfeit and adulterated?
And your "Canadian" drugs may actually be from a third-world country like China, the country that has been poisioning its own citizens for decades with the melanine that killed US pets. When FDA experimented with a buy of drugs from a Canadian Internet pharmacy, the payment cleared through an off-shore island account. The drugs were not from Canada, and they were adulterated. See the drug comparison chart here.
If your drugs are not approved here, you can already bring in a supply of approved drugs under FDA's "Personal Import" program.
In another case like the poisoned pet food, a Chinese company that sold a batch of diethylene glycol, a chemical cousin of antifreeze that killed at least 51 people in Panama, had no license to sell pharmaceuticals, the government said today.
The state of Rhode Island has a great safety site here.
FDA news on imports is here.