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October 18, 2004
Cheap Drugs from Canada Don't Grow on Trees
The Financial Times has an article regarding drug re-importation from Canada. The article points out that several Canadian online pharmacies will not be accepting bulk orders from U.S. states and municipalities. The reason? They don't have enough medicine to go around:
But growing concern in Canada that growing exports to the US could lead to rising prices and shortages north of the border has prompted the Canadian International Pharmacy Association (Cipa), whose members include several of the biggest internet and mail-order drugstores, to act. “We don't want to give Americans the impression that we have unlimited supply for them to tap into on a commercial basis,” said David Mackay, the association's executive director. Americans, he added, “can't get everything from Canada. We can't be your complete drugstore”.
This point was predicted months ago by Sally Pipes at the Pacific Research Institute. At a debate that featured Dr. Milton Friedman, Congressman Gil Gutknecht, Don McCanne, and James Glassman, Pipes made this exact point:
They have 31 million people in Canada, and here in the US we have almost 300 million people. When Governor Blegoyavitch in Illinois is talking about importing all of the drugs for his state employees and his Medicaid recipients, he's talking about $2 billion worth of imported drugs. Now, as I mentioned, the Canadian industry is $8 billion. So a quarter of the Canadian drugs would be being re-exported to the United States, which I think just is not feasible.
Read the whole debate if you have a chance. It raise a host of other issues with respect to drug re-importation from both sides of the matter.
Posted by Peter Mork at October 18, 2004 9:34 AM
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