Drugs vs. Cows — Dems still want answers

Last month, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new chair of the DCCC, started raising a fuss over the Bush administration’s disparate standards for importation of Canadian prescription medication and Canadian beef. The safe one can’t come in to the U.S., while the suspect one can. Emanuel wrote to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to ask for an explanation, but he hasn’t received a response.

Over the weekend, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) picked up where Emanuel left off.

Speaking in the weekly Democratic radio address Saturday from Helena, Montana, Gov. Brian Schweitzer said “local pharmacists should be allowed to reimport safe, affordable prescription drugs from Canada, where American-made, U.S. taxpayer-subsidized medicine is sold for as little as half the U.S. retail price.”

He said that for five years, the government “has had the ability to lower the prescription drug cost for every person in America by as much as 50 percent. In five years, they’ve not delivered. Since they continue to sit on the sidelines, states have no choice but to do it for themselves.” Safety concerns about Canadian drugs “manufactured by American companies, are unfounded,” Schweitzer said.

Simultaneously, Schweitzer noted, Bush is reopening the border to Canadian beef, despite concerns over mad-cow disease. Schweitzer said that when Bush was in Montana recently, “We had just one question for him: “Why allow bad beef to enter the U.S. from Canada and not allow safe medicine?”

Schweitzer, a longtime Montana political figure elected governor last year, has chartered buses since 1999 to bring senior citizens over the border to purchase drugs “at a savings of more than half or one third of what they were paying in the United States.”

“On the bus rides I would give the seniors citizens clipboards. They would tally all the trucks they saw with Canadian plates heading into the United States carrying cattle, hogs and logs and yet prescription drugs, made in the U.S., shipped to Canada aren’t allowed back across the border. This makes no sense.”

No, it doesn’t. But in all the reports I saw about this over the weekend, there was one thing I couldn’t find: an administration response.

As the Emanuel letter helps demonstrate, the Dems have been on this kick for a while, noting that three known cases of mad cow disease are insufficient evidence to halt the opening of the U.S. market to Canadian cattle, but an impeccable safety record for prescription drugs from Canada has no bearing on Bush’s opposition to importation.

It’s possible, I suppose, that reporters just did straight stories over the weekend about the subject of the Dems’ radio response, and never called the White House for a response. It seems more likely, however, that reporters did ask for the official administration line on the issue and were effectively told, “No comment.”

Indeed, there’s an eerie silence from the Bush gang here. For all their sophisticated polling, media manipulation, and message development, one gets the distinct impression that they simply haven’t been able to come up with a compelling (and coherent) response to the drugs vs. cows question.

With this in mind, it seems Dems would be wise to keep asking it, especially this week, since March 7 is the day the administration wants Canadian beef importation to be expanded again, despite two more recent cases of mad cow disease north of the border.