Pharma Karma

The
thing we don’t get about cheaper drugs from Canada is how come they’re
so much cheaper? If Canadian pharmacies are selling US manufactured
drugs for less than half of what they cost in the US, it means that they
are selling them in the US for more than twice as much as they need to
to make a decent profit.

Obviously, they can get away with this because they, through their lobbyists,
have convinced the Congress and the FDA that they need these obscene
profit megamargins
to support research, development, clinical trials, etc. In reality
this is largely smoke and mirrors, and the US market has long been a
gold mine for this multinational industry.

Pharma, as the pharmaceutical industry
lobbyists are known, are considered the creme de la creme of American
lobbyists, with sophistication,continental flair, unlimited funds and
connections
that reach high
in circles of power private and public around the world, Without their
efforts our drug prices would be much closer to the Canadians’.

So how do those politicians (largely Democrats) get away with letting
their constituents legally import American drugs from Canada and circumvent
one of the slickest scams perpetrated on the American public in the past
century, by some of their
biggest
contributors
and corporate
sponsors? Will there be repercussions in future reelection campaigns?  These
powerful corporations are not going to walk away from billions of dollars
of annual windfall profits just because of some election year mania for
economic fair play….

We may be looking at a nationwide insurrection. Currently, one to two
million Americans are defying federal law by using the Internet to
purchase drugs from Canadian pharmacies. And, according to one Kaiser
Family Foundation
and Harvard University School of Public Health poll, approximately
80 percent of Americans support importing RX drugs from Canada. Who
can
blame them? In 2002, Americans paid 67 percent more than Canadians
for patented drug products, and medicines will cost US consumers an
estimated
$210 billion in 2004. The groundswell is so strong that Health and
Human Services Secretary Tommy Thomson conceded in May that Congress
will inevitably
have to yield.

Much of the blame for the lack of action at the federal level can be
pinned on Pharma, the pharmaceutical lobby, which values protecting
profits above lives,
and which is playing hard-ball in hopes of beating back an importation law.

article from Znet