Word: fda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FDA maintains that "consumers who buy prescription drugs from Canada are at risk of suffering adverse events, some of which can be life threatening. These risks include potential side effects from inappropriately prescribed medications, dangerous drug interactions or side effects due to drug contamination." Indeed. But at the same time the FDA is zealously guarding the northern border against errant pill entry, TIME's investigation suggests the real picture is quite different from the one painted by the FDA and some members of Congress...
Influential lawmakers have given unqualified support to the FDA's anti-Canadian stance, among them Orrin Hatch, a Republican Senator from Utah. Says Hatch: "Many of my constituents have written, asking why they cannot use the lower-cost medications from Canada. The answer is easy: it is just irresponsible for Congress to jeopardize public safety by allowing the unchecked reimportation of drugs ... If we truly care about our seniors and other patients who depend upon prescription drugs, we should not expose them to what amounts to pharmaceutical Russian roulette...
Actually, pharmaceutical roulette is played every day in the U.S.--with FDA-approved drugs. Each year an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people die as a result of adverse reactions from FDA-sanctioned pharmaceutical drugs sold in America. In fact, mistakes in administering drugs, often in hospitals, are the fourth-or sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., depending on how the cases are counted. By comparison, the risk from defective, counterfeit or mislabeled drugs from Canada is presumed but unproved by any evidence. When TIME asked a spokesman for PhRMA, the drug-industry association, if there were...
...decidedly significant side effects began to leak out: liver damage, sometimes requiring a transplant and in extreme cases resulting in death. Bristol-Myers announced in 2002 that it would stop selling the drug in the Netherlands and Sweden, and eventually withdrew it from all of Europe and Canada. The FDA's only response in the U.S. has been to require a black-box warning on the label, stating in part, "Cases of life-threatening hepatic failure have been reported in patients treated with Serzone." Over the past few years, the FDA has banned more than half a dozen drugs that...
While the FDA and the drug industry have talked at length about the threat posed by drugs brought in from Canada, what they neglect to mention is this: prescription drugs bought by Americans increasingly are produced in foreign countries with minimal FDA oversight and then shipped to the U.S. In 2002 pharmaceutical imports to the U.S. totaled $40.7 billion, a nearly fivefold increase from $8.7 billion in 1995. Seventeen of the 20 largest drug companies worldwide now make drugs in Ireland, largely because of tax incentives. Pfizer's Lipitor for cholesterol, the largest-selling drug in the world, is made...