More than 150 years ago, Baltimore's port inspector saw Europe's poorest-quality drugs being dumped on the United States. He knew substandard medicines hurt soldiers abroad and wanted to defend citizens at home. Port inspectors, doctors and pharmacists demanded higher standards for drug safety. As a result, the United States has the safest drug use system in the world.
Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski and her colleagues on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee recently defended drug safety and protected patients by demanding that any effort to obtain drugs from abroad have the secretary of health and human services' guarantee that it would protect patients and save money. Past Food and Drug Administration commissioners have claimed it can't be done, and state efforts to import drugs have failed to show savings while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.
Apparently, some in Congress believe that counterfeit drugs are not a real problem - despite the fact that numerous reports suggest that the worldwide counterfeit-drug epidemic is a threat to the health and security of American consumers. According to Customs and Border Protection officials, seizures of counterfeit imports coming into the U.S. rose by 22 percent (and by 141 percent in value) during the first half of 2007. It is impossible to know if a Web site with a Canadian flag links to a Middle Eastern pharmacist selling drugs from Turkey or even Iraq. It is downright scary to know drugs being made with cement mixers can look so real that not even scientists can correctly pick out the drug their company safely makes under strict FDA oversight.
