June 26, 2007
Wired Magazine

I have a medical condition that requires an expensive drug regimen, and I’m considering buying my meds from an online Canadian pharmacy. Good idea?

Legal caveats first: By ordering rugs from a Canadian Web site, you’re technically violating US law. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act largely forbids the importation of drugs by anyone except the original manufacturer. In practice, while the government will occasionally smack down a business that reimports, it’s generally loath to hassle regular folks who just want to save a few bucks. As Food and Drug Administration spokesperson Kimberly Rawlings carefully puts it, the agency “typically takes a risk-based approach in using our limited resources to pursue violations of the act with respect to imported drugs.” Translation: The Man is tacitly cool with your ordering prescription drugs from north of the border.

And won’t somebody please think of the children? Yours, I mean. If those meds are staving off serious health problems and you really can’t manage the cost of buying American, then you owe it to your family to stay health and keep playing the bread winner. “Given that a person’s health is at stake, one can make an argument that there’s an ethnical obligation to obtain the necessary drugs”, says Michael Geist, an expert on Internet law at the University of Ottawa Law School.

By that logic, though, you must make sure your actions do no harm. And that means purchasing only from reputable vendors, not the myriad shysters who litter your inbox with ungrammatical Viagra come-ons. A 2005 study by risk-management firm Cyveillance found that nearly 80 percent of “Canadian pharmacies” were actually registered in other countries – the US, mostly, but also Barbados, Vietnam, and El Salvador – in many cases, places where drug quality isn’t as carefully monitored. Don’t be duped by an official-looking seal on the pharmacy’s homepage. Instead, check the Web site of the Canadian International Pharmaceutical Association, which certifies upstanding vendors, or contact a pharmacy college located in the site’s purported province. Otherwise, you could end up with a bottle full of sawdust pills and the queasy feeling that your money is paying for lap dances in San Salvador.

Source: http://www.winonadailynews.com/articles/2007/05/07/opinion/otherviews/
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