The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of legalizing the importation of drugs from the United States to Canada. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context for the American ban on importation of drugs from Canada and then to discuss the terms of the debate on whether the ban should be lifted and the impact that lifting the ban would have on the prescription-drug market in the United States.
America's contemporary history of drugs importation from Canada begins in 1987, when the safety and authenticity of drugs was part of the discourse of pharmaceuticals importation. The Prescription Drug Marketing Act of 1987 prohibited the importation of "unapproved" medicines. As a practical matter, that prevented anyone besides pharmaceuticals manufacturers from importing drugs into the United States (New York Times, 2003). Since 1987, three related trends have changed the pharmaceutical environment and the discourse of drugs importation from Canada. One trend has been the dramatic increase in the use of prescription drugs as medical interventions. A second trend has been the dramatic growth of direct-to-consumer, or DTC, advertising of prescription drugs, which began in the mid-1980s (ACP, 1998). In 1994, DTC accounted for $266 million in advertising revenue; by 2000 that figure had jumped to some $2.5 billion in 2000, most of it devoted to television advertising (Frank, et al., 2002). A third trend has been the persistent increase in the cost of the pharmaceuticals to patients; the "exorbitant" cost of prescription drugs has been described as the "driver" of escalating health-care costs in the U.S., with Americans paying up to 10 times more for a prescription drug than other people around the world (Gutknecht, 2003, p. 46). Financial hardship has motivated thousands of American consumers to seek out Canadian sources for their prescription drugs, with transactions being conducted over the Internet. Publish...