Reply #27: I hate to repeat myself -- but *leave us out of it*

[iverglas]

That's all. Just leave us out of it. All of you -- Kerry and his plan to have USAmericans buy their drugs from Canada, the FDA and whatever the fuck it's on about.

We are not your dealer.

And we are not some primitive pre-industrial society incapable of performing complex tasks like dispensing pharmaceuticals -- or protecting our pharmaceutical supply from "terrorism", which just doesn't seem to be a problem up here.

Leave us out of it.


I have seldom heard anything as ludicrous as a candidate for president of the US (or governor of a US state, or any of the rest of them) promising to solve a problem in his/her own country by going cross-border shopping. Well, except for whatever the fuck the FDA is on about.

Canadians enjoy lower drug prices because we negotiated them with the pharmaceutical companies. We negotiated them for *us*, not for you down there. A deal of this nature is the result of agreement between two willing parties. The parties are willing to make the deal in a particular set of circumstances. If the circumstances change, one party just might not be willing to deal.

When your local supermarket puts hamburger on sale at a low low price, it doesn't invite all the other supermarkets to come in and stock up. Its hamburger suppliers would hardly be willing to provide the hamburger cheap to one supermarket if doing so were going to undermine its sales to other supermarkets. Apply that principle to Canada and the drug companies. Why would those companies sell drugs at low prices in Canada so that they could be sold in the US and undermine their sales there??

We feel for your seniors who have to choose between food and drugs. We feel for them a lot. But they do not live in some less-developed, impoverished nation; they live in the proverbial richest country in the world. It is really not our responsibility to solve their problems at potential serious risk to ourselves.

There are also risks involved in being used as a scapegoat by the most powerful country in the world for its various other woes. There may be not a grain of truth, or even a colour or probability, in whatever the fuck the FDA is on about -- but this constant focus on Canada as the potential source of contaminated drugs, inappropriate drugs, blah blah, is not exactly flattering. And we all know how much easier it is to do unpleasant things to someone once your constituency has heard that someone vilified and demonized repeatedly.

The image of Canada in the US *does* matter to Canadians -- not as a matter of national pride, but as a matter of economic security. We already endure enough illegal and improper interference with our export trade to the US (softwood lumber, the mad cow nonsense -- thousands of people out of work, whole regions economically devastated), whether for protectionist reasons or just to punish us for not jumping when told to. We don't need any more smearing of the sort can only create the climate for further assaults on our economy.

Just leave us the hell out of it. Really. Democrats have a responsibility to the people of their own country to solve their problems, and it is cheap and cowardly to use our coat-tails as a way to avoid confronting that problem, whether it be by providing adequate income support or targeted subsidized drug programs or by standing up to the pharmaceutical companies.

The failure to do that is the real cause of nonsense like what is being spouted by the FDA; *we* have nothing to do with it. We wish you well and we wish you luck, but you're really just going to have to plant your own backyard and deal with your own weeds, and not rely on picking our veggies and blaming us for your homegrown thistles and thorns.