By James L. Martin
The legislation on drug reimportation proposed recently by Senator John McCain is both unwise and unhealthy. And in fact, the Senator’s plan should be labeled, ‘Hazardous To Your Health.’
President Bush just signed into law legislation crafted by Congress to provide a prescription drug benefit while improving access to generic drugs for all Americans, negating the need to go outside the U.S. for drugs. The 60 Plus Association, of which I’m President, endorsed this long overdue proposal.
Frankly, drug reimportation is an old debate and hasn’t a lot to do with lower costs but an awful lot to do with safety. It always comes down to this: until such time as the Secretary of Health and Human Services can demonstrate to Congress that reimporting American-made drugs into the United States would be safe — assurances both Donna Shalala under President Clinton and Tommy Thompson under President Bush have not been able to provide — the no-importation rule applies. No such difference for this vital safeguard has changed. As a matter of fact, we live in a more dangerous world than ever before. Terrorists lie in wait for any opportunity to hurt the West in general — Americans in particular — because of our freedoms and liberties, the very things they target, the very things they revile.
As Mark McClellan, FDA Commissioner said recently, his agency “cannot guarantee the safety of Canadian drugs.” Allowing Canadian drugs into the US would create “a wide inlet for counterfeit drugs and other dangerous products potentially injurious to the public health.
Tainted drugs. Old drugs. Fake drugs. Just exactly what kind of drugs will enter the U.S. from Canada — will they be our drugs sold back to us or Mexican drugs or drugs from Calcutta or someplace else? We don’t know. And until such time as we do, drug reimportation is an accident waiting to happen. As a matter of fact, it’s revealing that India recently upped the penalty for manufacturing counterfeit drugs from life imprisonment to the death penalty because of the rapid rise in production of these unsafe drugs.
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Jim Martin is President of the 60 Plus Association, a national non-partisan senior citizen organization based in Arlington, VA
