Yesterday’s mail included a flyer from a group called The Partnership for Safe Medicines — asking us to thank Senator Carper for his vote that would have asked for changes to the ACA to include a provision to let Americans import their prescription drugs from Canada. Take a look at the images above and below to see this bit of propaganda:
Did you see what they did there? They want to make this about counterfeit drugs and that somehow millions of Americans armed with prescriptions are going to be ordering fake drugs from Canada. What they’ve done here is erase a couple of big things — that the Canadians get their drugs from the same places we do. And that if we approve this importation, you can approve it from the same pipelines that Canadians get their drugs from. The Canadians have drugstores too, and while you may have to get your prescription rewritten by a Canadian doctor, Canadian drugstores are not in the business of selling fake drugs to their citizens. They’d be shut down by the Canadian government, right?
The key to safely importing drugs from Canada is to steer Americans to the places where Canadians are allowed to buy their drugs from. That is probably harder than it sounds, but it can’t be impossible. If Americans are buying fake drugs from Canada now, it is because they do not have enough information to identify an approved and licensed supplier. This is something that the FDA could do relatively easily and tell us where to find this info.
So we aren’t particularly fooled by this spendy bit of propaganda by people who have a decent investment in Carper’s campaigns. And if I am a Democratic legislator anywhere, I am asking my funders to stand down from sending out stuff like this. Dems are in no mood for corporate lobbyists trying to convince us that they’ve gotten you to stand up for our interests. Because they haven’t. We still know that Americans spend the most on prescription drugs and we know why. We don’t need mailings from your funders to remind us of why we pay such a hefty price.
I agree, this is pathetic and yet another attempt to shield Dems that voted not to import drugs from Canada. If you know anybody who lives in proximity to the Canadian border ask them if Americans frequently cross over to buy drugs there, would be surprised if the response did not closely resemble “Hell yeah they do!”. And finally I could not agree more that Dems have had it with the corporate stooge game that is played so often in Delaware, ads like this are obvious fabrications spawned by the drug industry, excuse me, racket.
Yes I should have mentioned that if you live at the Canadian border, cheaper drugs are definitely possible for you. I had a colleague at an employer who had an HQ in Niagara Falls. He would go up about once per month for work and pop over to Niagara Falls Canada to get a month’s worth of meds for a child who had an autoimmune disorder. He saved a few hundred dollars a month doing this. It slays me just how tone deaf this thing is. Saw someone report on FB that there is a Coons version too.
We all need to call to not thank him. Ugh he’s shady!
I got the one praising Coons a few weeks ago. It’s exactly the same except for the name and picture. Tangentially related: You know how Republicans like to complain about spending money on humanitarian aid abroad — but did you know that USAID contracts stipulate that any medical supplies purchased (not sure about other kinds of aid) must be purchased from American manufacturers and transported on American carriers from the US to the foriegn country? That was the situation 20 years ago, and I can’t imagine it has changed.
I worked with a USAID funded program in eastern Europe in the 1990s and because of these rules, our effectiveness (amount of goods we could buy and time it took to get the goods to the beneficiaries, therefore responsiveness to emergencies) was significantly reduced. I researched the safety and efficacy of European and Asian drug suppliers and appealed for an exception but was denied. Reason cited — patient safety. Where are the reports of people dying from drugs sold by legitimate manufacturers in other countries? They have similar safety regulations and standards and inspections. All the information is online. Yes, I am still pissed off about it.
And of course the lead pharmacist at New England Compounding Center was convicted yesterday…..
Has this story been forwarded to other Democratic/progressive websites blogs?