Importation no sure thing, despite candidates support

The Buffalo News
By Peter J. Pitts
March 15, 2008

I sit inevitable that Americans will soon be allowed to buy prescription drugs from other countries?

It might seem like it. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have all promised to repeal the federal law banning drug importation. Polls show most Americans want access to the overseas supply of cheap knockoffs of this country’s most popular pills.

But don’t be fooled. Importing foreign drugs would be politically dangerous for the next president — and just plain dangerous for Americans.

McCain frames his opposition to the ban as an extension of his free-market bona fides. But new competition won’t cause a reduction in drug prices. According to the Congressional Budget Office, unrestricted importation would decrease spending on prescription drugs by only 1 percent.

What’s more, lifting the ban would seriously undermine McCain’s central campaign pledge to “defend our country from its enemies.” Imported counterfeit drugs pose a serious threat to national security. According to the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, the terrorist group Hezbollah has already been caught funneling counterfeit pills through Canada into the United States.

Also, legalizing drug importation would flood the domestic market with counterfeit meds, jeopardizing the health of millions of American patients. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 10 percent of the world’s drug supply is counterfeit.

The political outlook for the Democrats is no better. Obama’s record on national security is slim, and exposing American patients to dangerous pills would prove his critics right. As for Hillary Clinton, it seems bizarre that her avowed opposition to unfettered free trade doesn’t extend to drugs.

Of course, all the candidates promise that only safe drugs will be imported, but none has explained how they intend to pay for that promise — or how they will enforce it. The understaffed, underfunded Food and Drug Administration is already struggling to keep counterfeit drugs out. The agency would need a massive budget increase to monitor a tidal wave of untested drugs.

And popular support is hardly a guarantee. Witness the foreign drug programs in Illinois, Massachusetts and Minnesota, which shirked the federal ban and allowed residents to purchase pills from Canada. Once residents found out that drugs coming from our neighbors up north aren’t actually regulated by the Canadian government, they understandably stopped buying them.

The fact that McCain, Obama and Clinton all favor legalizing foreign drug importation doesn’t mean it’s a fait accompli after the election. Repealing the ban would endanger American lives and massively increase federal spending, all without making so much as a dent in the country’s health care costs.

That’s far from the makings of a political slam dunk.

Peter J. Pitts is president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner.