Dems Patty Murray and Michael Bennet help GOP kill a Sanders-Warren bill to lower drug prices

[pnwmom]

35. He's wrong. What IS true is that many drugs sold by US manufacturers

are produced in other countries, like India, and then imported here -- and there are safety regulations that cover them.

Taibbi says this:

"But we already do import foreign drugs, and have an established safety certification process. In fact, an astonishing 40 percent of all pharmaceuticals sold in the United States are already imported, as are 80 percent of the chemical ingredients. These imported drugs and drug ingredients arrive by way of more than 300,000 foreign food and drug manufacturing facilities that are regularly certified as safe by the FDA."

But this is misleading because there is nothing in Bernie's bill that protects INDIVIDUALS who don't buy from US pharmacies -- i.e, who buy directly from online Canadian pharmacies. Or from non-pharmacies only pretending to be in Canada. The current safety regulations only protect people who buy products from US pharmacies -- not online from other countries. You can see why that would be the case. We can inspect product that arrives at a US pharmaceutical firm and gets distributed to pharmacies here, and from pharmacies to individual patients. But how much more complicated would it be to inspect millions of packages from other countries that get delivered straight to consumers?

Canada regulates the safety of drugs sold to Canadian citizens, but it doesn't regulate drugs that pass through Canada on the way to somewhere else -- like a drug sold on an online "Canadian" pharmacy. So those fake drugs are slipping through a giant loophole, and some of them are already arriving here. Postal inspectors have found them in Seattle, and Patty Murray knows that. It was in the newspapers here.

Here is some more information. Making sure our medication supply is safe is already a major challenge. We shouldn't be passing a bill that could make it even worse.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202523/