Feds Seizures Make American Unwell

The stories about the government seizing legitimate prescription drugs from Canada seem a bit unbelievable at times. We couldn’t understand how a government could so easily side with pharmaceutical companies over its citizens trying to buy their medicine at an affordable price.

The stories are true however, and we read story about a gentleman from Madison Lake, a retiree named Maurice Hardie who is in the process of appealing his case to federal authorities. The cholesterol drug, Prevencor, has always been shipped to him from a legitimate, low cost Canadian pharmacy for six years.

Now, under an apparently new directive, the government has begun seizing the pills of people like Hardie. Some 10 percent of the medicines are now being intercepted, and recipients face a daunting government bureaucracy to get them returned.

Of course, what makes this bad situation even worse is the ever-increasing cost of prescription drugs that send many of our seniors and other various age Americans to Canada in the first place. In fact, Americans now purchase some $700 million of medicine from Canadian pharmacies.

The government has limited the supply and made it more difficult for honest citizens to pay an honest price to get their medicines. Congress should be outraged, and they are. They voted 68-32 recently to overturn the seizures at our borders. We thank some of our members of Congress for trying to do something.

They’ve recently inserted an amendment into the Homeland Security funding bill that would prevent customs from seizing prescription drugs. Members of the Senate and House, fielding numerous complaints about the seizures from constituents, passed legislation earlier this year barring the practice.

However, the bill is now in a conference committee where it will undoubtedly be subject to heavy pharmaceutical industry lobbying, and where members of the conference committee can avoid accountability, and we who literally ‘pay the piper’ must wait for that outcome as always in slow fashion.

First District Congressman Gil Gutknecht has long supported a free market for prescription drugs, favored allowing Canadian imports and has complained to the FDA about the practice of seizing Canadian drugs. He should now use his seniority in the Republican Party to make sure this provision gets through the conference committee, dominated by his party. Let’s encourage him with a few letters shall we? (As well as other members of Congress)
It’s just the right thing to do.

Congress Emails: Click here for the 540 members of the 109th Congress

Reference Article Rewritten by
XLPharmacy

The Cost of American Medicine - 11 Simple Facts

Fact #1: 45.8 million Americans under the age of 65 lacked health insurance coverage in 2004.

Fact #2: In 2005, the cost of health care insurance for family coverage surpassed the annual salary of a minimum-wage worker.

Fact #3: Drug benefits of many employer insurance plans are being reduced every year. These reductions in drug benefits include steps such as higher premiums for drug benefits, higher co-payments on drug purchases, higher annual deductibles, tiered cost sharing, annual dollar limits on drug purchases, tightening eligibility rules and completely cutting drug benefits all together. This means more and more individuals are becoming underinsured when it comes to prescription drug coverage.

Fact #4: U.S. National Health Care Expenditures per Capita rose by 123% from 1990 to 2004. In that same time frame Prescription Drug Expenditures increased 78.6%. Prescription drug spending is one of the fastest growing components of national health care spending. In fact, in 1999, national prescription drug spending increased an astounding 18.2%, compared to an 5.2% increase for physician and clinical services and a 5.0% increase for hospital care.

Fact #5: Retail prescription drug prices increased an average of 8.3% a year from 1994 to 2004 (from an average of $28.67 to $63.59), more than triple the average annual inflation rate of 2.5%.

Fact #6: The five most highly paid Drug Company executives pocketed more than $183 million in compensation in 2001, with the top 25 pharmaceutical execs averaging nearly $6 million in annual compensation in 2000. That compensation does not count stock options, which can add millions of dollars to a CEO's income.

Fact #7: Prescription drug costs are expected to increase by 12.6% a year for the next 10 years, according to a recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. By 2010, 16% of what Americans spend each year on personal health care will be spent on prescription drugs, the department said. In 1999, it was 9.4%.

Fact #8: The United States is the only developed nation that does not regulate drug prices. American consumers pay much more for their prescription drugs than any other country in the World. In fact, a 2003 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration compared the U.S. prices of a list of 54 prescription drugs with the prices in 9 other countries and found that the prices in these 9 other countries were 18 to 67% lower than the U.S. prices.

Fact #9: FDA-approved does not mean "Made in the U.S.A.". Actually, more than 40% of the drugs sold in the U.S. are made by foreign-based firms that may have American operations.

Fact #10: An estimated 2 million Americans now buy their drugs from a Canadian pharmacy.

Fact #11: A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in September 2005 (Volume 143 Issue 6) concluded that brand name medications are often substantially less expensive when purchased from Canadian Internet pharmacies instead of from major online U.S. drug chain pharmacies.

Individual's struggling to afford their medication costs may want to look to Canada as a viable option for purchasing their prescription drugs. Canada is a very highly regulated and safe country to buy medications from. Millions of Americans have been ordering medications from Canada for more than 5 years now and there have been no reported cases of an American citizen harmed by an inferior medication. American residents can save an average of 80% on their prescriptions when buying from a licensed Canadian pharmacy.

Original Facts presented by Jeremy Cockerill a licensed Canadian pharmacist. Mr. Cockerill graduated from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Manitoba with Honors in 1998.

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What Do I do with left-over medications?

The answer isn't as simple as you might think

I plead guilty to having flushed some down the tube before I heard that the Environmental Protection Agency frowns on this method of disposing of prescription drugs.

So where do you take them?

When asking at the local Pharmacy where one should take unused drugs to dispose of them safely, the clerks response was he said he'd check with the pharmacist, and came back with the advice to flush them down the toilet. But the EPA warns us not to do this.

According to the EPA:

"If your throw your pharmaceuticals and health products down the drain or flush them down the toilet, and if your home is connected to a municipal sewage system, some of these of course are going to typically be discharged into lakes, rivers, or oceans, because most waste water treatment plants are not designed to remove or destroy this stuff from waste water."

On the contrary, they may kill the bacteria in the septic system that aids in breaking down the waste in the household waste water. These helpful bacteria are also a component used in sewage treatment plants to break down waste.

But, where do they end up when you get rid of them?

Scientists are finding everything from aspirin to Zoloft in our streams, rivers, and lakes, neither flushing or trashing the old medications is a good method for disposal. Children or animals could get into drugs that are simply tossed into the trash and once they reach the landfill they can trickle down into the ground water.

Okay, Okay...So, what do we do with these drugs?

It is unlawful for pharmacies to take them back for redistribution. (Makes sense, but what a sad thing it could not be done). It is even unlawful to give them to an agency that could use them for its uninsured patients. It is also unlawful to pass them on to family members or friends, although this happens all too often. And at the cost of medicine today, some understand why.

Well, Is It Really Hurting the Fish? (You'd Be Suprised What's Happening To The Fish!)

According to a report on the U.S. EPA Web site, studies have confirmed that female hormones are in such abundance in our rivers and streams that the aquatic life is being affected. They report a feminization of male fish found in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan. This is linked to the exposure to both natural and synthetic estrogens and chemicals that mimic estrogens in the water.

According to U.S. EPA report, the majority of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals are believed to reach the aquatic environments via the effluent released into the streams and rivers by sewage treatment plants.

Investigating the scarcity of fish in the Columbia River in Washington state near the Oregon border, scientists found only female fish, or at least what appeared to be female fish until their DNA was analyzed and many of them were found to actually be males.

The same phenomenon was observed in England and both sites were said to be downstream from sewage treatment plants. Scientists have discovered that male alligators are similarly affected in Lake Apopka, Fla., and they also found many infertile male panthers.

Dr. Leonard Sax said most of the chemicals under study did not exist before 1950. In his study, he found that many of them mimic the action of the female sex hormones called estrogens. Sax said a similar process to that affecting the aquatic animals and other wild life may also be affecting the human male.

No matter which way you choose to dispose of them, It seems the burden is on the person taking the medication or in the case of leftover meds, not taking them.

A Perfect Solution, Not in the U.S., but in Canada

The Canadians have a much better solution. They put the onus on the pharmaceutical companies that produced the drugs. Sounds fairly logical, don't you think?
In most of the Canadian provinces, there is a Medications Return Program whereby people can take their outdated or unused medications to their local pharmacy where they will be held for the pharmaceutical companies.

In 1997, British Columbia established Post-Consumer Residual Stewardship through its Waste Management Act. The Post-Consumer Pharmaceutical Stewardship Association was formed in 2000 to administer the Medications Return Program.

In eight of Canada's provinces, consumers may return, at no charge, residual prescription and over-the-counter medications, vitamin and mineral supplements and natural health products.
It is then up to the pharmaceutical and other manufacturers to dispose of the excess in ways that are acceptable to the Waste Management Act standards or find ways to safely recover the basic drugs for possible recycling.

Why is the U.S. Lagging Behind Here?

Until the United States or individual states are forward thinking enough to adopt a program such as the one in Canada or England or Australia, remember the advice "Don't flush" and check with your local public works department to find out when the next HHW (Hazardous Household Waste) collection will take place.

America Doesn't Negotiate Drug Prices

In case you haven’t noticed, a large wall is being built around the American people to ensure that they remain prisoner to the drug industry. It’s easy to understand why drug makers want to force Americans to buy their products in the United States. Ours is the only industrialized country that doesn’t negotiate the prices the drug companies may charge.

As a result, a 90-day supply of Fosamax sells for $105 in Canada but $210 here. It’s less easy to understand why our leaders in Washington have sided with the drug makers and against the American people — less easy but not impossible. They’re well paid by the drug industry, which employs more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress.

Before there was a Medicare drug benefit, Washington didn’t dare mess with elderly Americans seeking affordable drugs from Canada. And since the start of the program this year, the Canadian drug mail-order business has dipped somewhat.

Of course, the Medicare drug-benefit law forbids the U.S. government to bargain on behalf of the beneficiaries. (That keeps taxpayers, who subsidize the program, on the hook for the higher prices.) Some older people didn’t want to join a Medicare drug plan or prefer the simplicity and savings of buying their drugs from Canada.

And many younger Americans who lack drug coverage use Canadian pharmacies to avoid domestic price-gouging. U.S. Customs says that it is stopping the imports from Canada to protect Americans from the harms of counterfeit drugs. Oh, sure. Actually, drugs ordered from licensed pharmacies in Canada are monitored by Health Canada, a government agency that is probably less corruptible than our own Federal Drug Administration.

If our elected officials in Washington truly cared about the well-being of the American people, they would have long ago done something about unfairly high drug prices. That way more people would have been able to afford the drugs they should take and poor people wouldn’t have to cut their pills in half to extend their prescriptions. (One state, Nevada, has thumbed its nose at Washington and has licensed four Canadian pharmacies to sell drugs to its residents. Several other states may follow its lead.)

Members of Congress have heard an earful from people enraged by the federal seizure of their medications. Both the Senate and the House have approved amendments to the Homeland Security appropriations bill that would bar Customs from using federal money to confiscate drugs. Do not assume, however, that this obnoxious policy will soon stop.

The bills will go into conference committee, and if history is any guide, drug-industry lobbyists will cement shut the Canadian door to lower drug prices. So much for free trade, or even freedom. And what about you red-blooded Americans out there? Are you going to sit passively as the back-room boys try to preserve the ludicrous ban on buying Lipitor from Canada? Americans, you really don’t have to put up with this.

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