With nostalgia, I’m announcing that PharmacyCheckerBlog will no longer be updated with new posts effective today. If you’re looking for similar news, analysis, and editorial efforts, check out PolicyPrescription.com.
Over 20 years ago, pharmacies in Canada began selling prescription drugs to Americans over the Internet. PharmacyChecker.com opened its virtual doors in 2003 to provide consumers, mostly in America, with information that helps them find the most affordable and safe prescription drugs from online pharmacies, including those located in Canada and other countries. This made the pharmaceutical industry mad at us. The industry doesn’t want Americans to have access to lower drug prices in other countries. They went on the attack.
Eleven years ago, PharmacyCheckerBlog was launched in large part to fight back against efforts funded by the pharmaceutical industry to discredit PharmacyChecker and sow disinformation about online pharmacies that scared Americans away from obtaining safe and more affordable prescription drugs from Canada and other countries.
The reality is that, over the years, PharmacyCheckerBlog has become a website where I write posts mostly about public policy, politics, and law as it relates to drug prices, drug importation, online pharmacies, and safety. I enjoy the subject matter and advocating for lower prescription prices in America – and pushing back against the misinformation propagated by Big Pharma! I will continue doing so at a new website called PolicyPrescription.com.
PharmacyChecker will continue fighting back! For those posts, you’ll need to go to PharmacyChecker.com.
For a fuller history of PharmacyCheckerBlog, click here.
In America, tens of millions of people are skipping necessary medications because the prices are too high. PharmacyChecker exists to help people, mostly Americans, find prescription drug safety and savings information on the Internet. Founded in 2002, our greatest accomplishment is verifying and identifying the safest international online pharmacies, sites that process orders filled by licensed pharmacies in Canada and different countries that require a prescription. We’re bestknown for comparing drug prices among properly credentialed online pharmacies.
This week the Business Leaders for Health Care Transformation (BLHCT) sent a letter to the CEO of Microsoft, signed by over 1,100 business owners, CEOs, and entrepreneurs and nearly 40 non-profit organizations:
“We do not all believe that having to personally import prescription medicines, using online pharmacies or otherwise, is the best solution for high drug prices in America, but we all recognize that it can be done safely and is a lifeline for many. To that effect, PharmacyChecker plays a valuable role in protecting consumers’ safety.”
The elephant in the room here: personal importation of prescription drugs is technically illegal under most circumstances. We get that. Still, millions of Americans buy medications from other countries each year, often online, because of cost and they are never prosecuted for doing so. Here’s the thing: We don’t sell medication, process or distribute prescription drugs in any manner. We verify and provide information. Period.
Using very similar talking points to Big Pharma-funded experts, in its quest to “educate” the public about the dangers of internet pharmacies and personal medicine imports, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) appears to have ignored the greatest pharmacy-related public health travesty happening right under its nose. Since the beginning of this century, billions of prescription opioid pills were wrongly, and in many cases unlawfully, pushed on and distributed to Americans. The result is about 500,000 deaths since 1999. The main culprits in sowing this drug epidemic are usually identified as big pharmaceutical companies and distributors.
Citing the case of the Rochester Drug Cooperative, I have asked before where the NABP was in tackling this opioid crisis. I was mostly referring to its quasi-regulatory role in certifying wholesale pharmacies through its Verified-Accredited Wholesale Distributors (VAWD) program because all major distributors accredited through VAWD – AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Cardinal Health – have been implicated in the opioid epidemic. As reported in the New York Times last week, a new court filing provides details showing how major U.S. pharmacy retail giants – including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, and Walmart – were “as complicit in perpetuating the crisis as the manufacturers and distributors of the addictive drugs.”
This week, I simply want to bring your attention to an article in The New Republic called “The Toxic Nationalism of the Pharmaceutical Industry.” Basically, the author Audrey Farley describes how the pharmaceutical industry has employed nationalism, racism, and prejudice in its communications and lobbying strategies that put profits over patients. To temper any hyperbolic mudslinging at the industry, overall, I note a disclaimer that most individuals working for drug companies are certainly no more biased or racist than other industries. My point is that Ms. Farley’s article just goes deeper in showing how disgusting and stupid the industry can actually be.
I’ll give two examples, the first I’ve written about before (but not as well). The Medicare Modernization and Prescription Drug Improvement Act of 2003 included legalizing the importation of lower-cost medicines from Canada, as long as the Secretary of Health and Human Services certified that the new imports would pose no additional safety risks and would yield substantial savings. The next year, someone from the Pharmaceutical and Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) commissioned the writing of a fictional novel in which Muslim terrorists poison the drug supply in Canada to kill Americans who were buying lower-cost medicine from Canada.
This week, journalist Ben Elgin of Bloomberg published an exceedingly thorough and investigative report about how the Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM), funded by the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), is behind a massive campaign to defeat drug importation proposals that seek to lower drug prices.In fact, the report disclosed that PSM apparently received $7 million in 2017 to oppose importation. But the story omitted what’s arguably most important to consumers now, as I see the evidence shows: PSM’s misinformation about access to lower-cost medicines available online from foreign pharmacies.
I’ve been writing about the Partnership for Safe Medicines since 2010. PharmacyChecker is a target of PSM’s “public education” campaigns about online pharmacies, and PSM is one of the defendants in our current antitrust lawsuit against several organizations funded by drug companies. PSM’s recent blitz against drug importation is not just about state wholesale drug importation proposals or Trump’s related initiatives: far from it. The evidence from its history shows it’s about undermining the case for personal drug importation.
The Bloomberg report points correctly to 2003, the year that legislation passed to allow importation from Canada, but with a poison pill built in. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would have to certify that the new imports would pose no new safety risks and would achieve significant savings. It was that same year that PhRMA hired Edelman, a public relations firm, to put together focus groups to find out how to stop Americans from importing their medications for personal use, since the federal prohibitions were not a deterrent (as no one is prosecuted for such small imports). PhRMA concluded that instilling fear of counterfeit drugs among consumers was the way of the future. That year, PSM was born.
As I wrote
a few weeks back, PharmacyChecker
filed an antitrust lawsuit against five organizations that we believe are largely
funded or backed by pharmaceutical companies. We allege that these
organizations have conspired to illegally suppress competition in the areas of online
pharmacy verification services and drug price comparisons on the Internet. The
organizations are the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP),
Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP), Partnership for Safe Medicines
(PSM), LegitScript, and the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP).
As part of that suit, we filed a motion for preliminary
injunction to immediately stop the NABP from including PharmacyChecker.com and
this blogsite on its “Not Recommended Sites” list. That list was created to
ostensibly identify rogue online pharmacies but has included safe international
online pharmacies from its very inception. More recently NABP’s oversight has
been expanded, apparently, to also include sites—such as this blog—that help
consumers avoid rogue online pharmacies and find affordable drug prices!
Welcome to PharmacyChecker Blog, brought to you by PharmacyChecker.com:
A source for news and analysis about drug prices and safety, online pharmacies and personal drug importation, published on behalf of American consumers.
