Pharmaceutical companies fight against free trade

By Alex Singleton | 27 June 2005

American pharmaceutical companies are currently funding a scare campaign to frighten US consumers away from supporting free trade in drugs. They claim imported drugs are unsafe even though free trade has been a resounding success in Europe for over two decades.

One drug company funded website, buysafedrugs.info, claims that free trade "is an open door for cheap, unsafe, foreign medications that will flood America, especially poor minorities." Yet these are the same "cheap, unsafe, foreign medications" that Pfizer et al are selling to Americans. If tampering is the issue, the European ones are safer because they are placed in tamper-proof bottles before they leave the factory. As Dr Peter Rost, a Pfizer Vice-President, has pointed out, US drugs are "shipped in big vats to wholesalers, and then poured into smaller, bulk-size containers, from which tablets are dispensed manually to the patient," which means there are lots of entry points for a terrorist.

The same website highlights a Seniors Coalition survey that shows that 71 percent of seniors oppose allowing importation of drugs from Slovakia, Greece, Portugal, Estonia and Latvia. We wouldn't drugs from dodgy European Union countries, would we?

Vested interests always like to be protected so that they can rig markets. In DC, drug companies reportedly employ two lobbyists for every member of Congress. Fortunately, they appear to be losing.