CHEAPER SNAKE OIL:

Canadian sites look overseas for drug supply: To combat shortages, online pharmacies used by U.S. consumers are seeking new sources. Safety could be an issue. (Daniel Costello, August 30, 2004, LA Times)

Millions of Americans now buy drugs from Canadian-based Internet pharmacies in an effort to save money. So far, the quantity and quality of the drugs has seemed relatively assured.

But during the last year, U.S. customers using Canadian websites have faced increasing difficulty getting top-selling medications such as Celebrex to treat arthritis and the antidepressant Effexor. That's because several of the world's biggest pharmaceutical makers are restricting supply to online Canadian pharmacies that ship to the U.S., leading to delays of several weeks for many customers. In severe cases, some sites have stopped accepting new clients looking for the hardest-to-get medications.

Faced with the growing shortages, Canadian Internet pharmacies are looking abroad themselves and increasingly selling U.S. consumers drugs that originate through pharmacies in England, Fiji, Israel and Chile. Depending on the country, that is raising concerns that U.S. consumers — many of them senior citizens — are getting medications from countries with less-stringent safety regulations than those in North America.

"It's a potentially scary situation" that a significant number of Canada-to-U.S. prescriptions could soon originate from other countries, says Marv Shepherd, a pharmacy professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and an expert in the field of cross-border prescription sales. It's particularly worrisome if Canadian companies "start to partner up with some of the more shaky countries," he says.

On the bright side, the whole outrsourcing of our pharmaceutical purchases that the Left is pushing could both collapse other countries socialized systems and make the quality of medications so iffy that folks will be less likely to use them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2004 7:01 AM