As a licensed pharmacist, I'm all too familiar with patients' difficulties getting medications they need and their physician has prescribed. As baby boomers age, pharmacists see more patients at our counters unable to obtain needed treatments for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. This issue is now being acknowledged and a healthy debate has begun over possible solutions. But one idea policymakers shouldn't pursue is opening up our country's secure drug supply to medicines coming from outside our borders.
The idea has been raised multiple times, but, for good reason, it's never been implemented. Importation is fraught with peril and has been deemed unsafe by Secretaries of Health and Human Services and FDA Commissioners from both Republican and Democratic administrations. Multiple legislative attempts to allow drug importation have ended in failure. In my home state of Maine, a judge went as far as to strike it down.
