The Bush administration has never really been able to come up with a reasonable defense for its opposition to the reimportation of prescription medication. The truth — the administration is doing the bidding of wealthy pharmaceutical companies that donate generously to his campaign — probably wouldn’t go over well with the public, so they desperately flail about, looking for some kind of justification that sounds coherent. They haven’t found one yet.
Usually, the argument focuses on patient safety. The administration insists that medication made in America and sent to Canada may somehow become unsafe if brought back to the States. (The radically different physiology of Canadians must make them immune to such dangerous medication. Lucky bastards.)
This week, however, as Jesse Taylor and Kevin Drum noted, the administration took another turn towards the absurd by arguing that the reimportation of prescription drugs leaves Americans vulnerable to a terrorist attack. All indications are that they weren’t kidding.
Tampering with prescription drugs could be a way for terrorists to launch an attack on Americans, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester Crawford said Wednesday.
Crawford said in an interview with The Associated Press that possible action by terrorists was the most serious of his concerns about the increasing efforts of states and cities to import drugs from Canada to save money.
(To avoid creating a sense of panic among the gullible, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security quickly came forward to say it has received “no specific information” of such a threat. How uncharacteristically responsible of them.)
To call the FDA announcement cynical and demagogic just isn’t strong enough.
One has to assume the administration has, once again, not thought through the absurdity of their arguments. Could a terrorist somehow tamper with medicine in Canada and hurt a patient in America? Of course that’s possible. But by that logic, we’d have to stop any and all trade with every country that produces a product with which al Queda could perhaps tamper.
The FDA’s Crawford suggested medication is a unique threat.
Would-be terrorists need only poke around the Internet to learn how Tylenol, then the nation’s leading painkiller, was removed from shelves, filled with cyanide and returned to stores to kill unsuspecting consumers two decades ago.
The incident in California 22 years ago has absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist threat Crawford was describing yesterday. The Center for American Progress responded to this well yesterday:
[The 1982 Tylenol case] incident was wholly confined to the domestic economy and thus has absolutely nothing to do with the highly regulated reimportation system being proposed in Congress. Crawford himself has admitted that it would cost just $58 million a year to establish a safe reimportation system that would then save seniors billions a year on medicine.
We’re talking about an administration that will go to almost any length to stop reimportation, no matter how popular it is with the public and no matter how much money it will save people who need the medication. Remember, this is an administration sent federal agents to harass and intimidate a busload of low-income seniors who had traveled to Canada to fill prescriptions of medication they couldn’t afford to buy in the United States.
And now they’re playing on the public’s fears over terrorism. They just have no shame.