by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jul 10, 2020 | Counterfeit Drugs
I have written extensively about how the pharmaceutical industry and its allies deceive the public by conflating the issue of counterfeit drugs with safe, more affordable prescription medicines that Americans purchase online and import for personal use. One of the industry’s main tactics is to make the counterfeit drug problem look as big as possible. They then falsely connect it to Americans buying legitimate meds online and as an excuse to oppose prescription drug importation in general. They do this through industry-funded groups and researchers.
A non-profit organization, funded by drug company Eli Lilly and other industry sources, called the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) has a page called “The Global Fight Against Illegal Online Pharmacies and Counterfeit Medicines.” It states: “Worth $200 billion a year, the market for counterfeit pharmaceuticals now eclipses almost everything in the underground economy, including prostitution, human trafficking and illegal arms sales.” On that same page, it goes on to report how ASOP is educating the public about “Canadian online pharmacies and drug importation” and “how the legalization of importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other foreign countries would endanger consumers by threatening the protections provided by the Drug Supply Chain Security Act of 2013.”
Where did that number, $200 billion come from?
It’s a vicious circle of seemed “authority.” Basically, a statistic appears in a seemingly authoritative article or even scholarly report. A citation appears with that statistic, but it is rarely checked or questioned because the authority is trustworthy enough. Then, the media sees that statistic and regurgitates it over and over and over again. In the case of this $200 billion figure, the story is no different.
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by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jul 2, 2020 | Drug Importation
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1.5% of adults in the U.S. who take prescription drugs purchase them from outside the U.S. to save money each year. That’s about 2.3 million people. In 2016, my review of a similar set of data estimated about four million per year. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2016 poll data was used to support an estimate showing that 19 million people, 8% of the adult population, have imported lower cost prescription drugs for personal use. What’s going on?
The JAMA study authors used 2015-2017 government data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which collected an assortment of health information from 61,238 individuals. As explained in the JAMA study:
“Survey respondents were asked whether they bought prescription drugs from a country other than the US to save money during the past 12 months. We defined respondents as purchasers of medications outside the US if they answered yes to the question.”
Past estimates, including my own, have also used NHIS data but may have extrapolated incorrectly. The percentages should be applied not to the general adult population but to those who take prescription drugs. The adult population is about 256 million. In this study, the sample population of 61,238 represented 152.2 million people who take prescription drugs. The JAMA study found that 1.5% purchased medications outside the U.S. to save money, which comes out to about 2.3 million. My past estimates looked at 1.6%, which was an earlier NHIS estimate of adults who import, of 256 million people, which came out to a little over 4 million people.
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by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jun 26, 2020 | Drug Importation
Canada is a good option for Americans seeking to access their medications at a lower cost through personal drug importation, but even I agree with the pharmaceutical industry when they say that wholesale drug importation on a large scale is not workable with Canada. Why? Simply because Canada is too small a nation to supply the U.S. market. I have written that there is much more promise if importation is expanded to the European Union. We already rely on the EU to assess U.S. drug safety, and current events have only brought that into greater focus.
Due to the world’s efforts to quell Covid-19, Regulatory Focus reported on increased cooperation between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). These drug regulators have engaged in regular consultations since 2003 in order to share insights and best practices. In 2014, that same cooperation led to the creation of Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRA). Due to an MRA between the FDA and EMA, the U.S. can rely on EU inspections of drug manufacturing establishments in any EU country. That means we have a lot of faith in EU pharmaceutical safety standards.
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