by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jun 26, 2017 | Advocacy, Controlled Drugs, Politics
Pharma-sponsored lackeys are using the hellish opioid crisis as an excuse to bash Senator Bernie Sanders’ drug importation bill, claiming it will worsen the crisis. This is all the more aggravating in light of the role of the pharmaceutical industry in causing the opioid death spiral in America in the first place. High drug prices and opioid abuse, such as lawful and illegal fentanyl use, are both killers. I published an article in The Hill on Friday called a Tale of Two Drug Bills to address this issue.
Tagged with: fentanyl, stop, synthetic opioid
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jun 23, 2017 | Internet Censorship
Principles to guide the Internet community on ethical medication sales
A few months back, I wrote about a panel that I put together as part of my work with PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice, a non-profit group dedicated to ending the crisis of high drug prices in America. The panel was one of hundreds of sessions at the RightsCon Conference in Brussels, an event that brings together Internet freedom, human rights and social justice activists. The panel discussed issues related to buying medication online, Internet freedom, importation and drug affordability – and the negative impact of the pharmaceutical industry on all of the above.
Essentially, drug companies have spent millions of dollars on funding “non-profit” groups, public relations efforts, lobbying Congress and international organizations, Interpol (I kid you not), etc., with the goal of making it hard, if not impossible, for people to buy safe and lower cost medication online from other countries, which include people in America, that can’t afford it locally. Their activities intentionally conflate the intentional sale of counterfeit and substandard drugs with safe international online pharmacies.
The panel was a great step forward in giving the consumer side of this issue a larger voice. The panelists discussed and edited a draft set of principles on medication sales and the Internet. It took a while, but, on June 15, 2017, Knowledge Ecology International and Prescription Justice finalized and endorsed what we’re calling the Brussels Principles, which are published below. (more…)
Tagged with: accessnow, brussels principles, KEI, Rightscon
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jun 15, 2017 | Politics and policy
In 1976, reggae legend, Peter Tosh, released his song “Legalize It” – calling for the legalization of marijuana. In it, he sings “legalize it, don’t criticize it.” Needless to say, that’s already becoming our reality in the U.S. where, to varying degrees, many states have made pot legal. The federal government has begrudgingly accepted dissension in the ranks of states. Yes, there are rumblings that under Attorney General Jeff Sessions things are going to change. We’ll see.
This week, journalist and pharmaceutical industry analyst, Ed Silverman, from Stat News, published an opinion article called “It’s time to make it legal for Americans to order prescription drugs from abroad.” Unlike the downpour of op-eds against importation sponsored by drug companies, Silverman has no financial interest in this.
To be intellectually honest, Silverman’s call to action is qualified. He seems to be saying to “legalize it,” but he’s not necessarily advising that we not “criticize it.” There are real threats from counterfeit and otherwise substandard drugs that need to be addressed in reforming the law. Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard, offers his own thoughts in Silverman’s piece: “We should be able to address this safety issue…To not have the conversation and instead say there’s no way to import medicines safely is a cop-out.” (more…)
Tagged with: boston globe, drug imports, ed silverman, legalize it, sanders, statnews
