As a follow up to this, it now appears that Canada will only ban bulk sales of medications to the United States but not sales to individuals. Since state programs like Illinois Rx involve the participating patients being shipped their medications individually, the Canadian ban on bulk sales would not affect the program. The Illinois Rx program, and anything similar, does still violate federal law. But,the government has been somewhat understandably reluctant to enforce the rules.
Canada’s health minister threatened on Wednesday to overhaul the country’s regulations on exporting prescription drugs, saying Canada would no longer be a cheap “drug store for the United States.”
Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said Canada would ban the bulk export of prescription drugs when their supplies were low at home. But he left vague how the ban would be put into place — and whether it would affect the thousands of individual purchases that take place across the U.S.-Canada border and over the Internet.
The ban is an attempt to head off an anticipated onslaught of drug demands from Americans if legislation pending in Congress legalizes Internet and bulk import of prescription drugs from Canada.
“Canada cannot be a drugstore for the United States of America; 280 million people cannot expect us to supply drugs to them on a continuous, uncontrolled basis,” Dosanjh said at a news conference.
Canadians must be assured access to an adequate supply of safe and affordable prescription drugs, Dosanjh said.
[...]
Canada’s decision would have no immediate impact on Illinois residents enrolled in I-SaveRx, a multistate program launched last October to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
About 10,000 people in five states including Illinois have signed up for I-SaveRx, said Rebecca Rausch, a spokeswoman for Gov. Blagojevich. The program links consumers to a network of about 40 foreign pharmacies, where they can buy drugs at a savings of up to 50 percent.
Orders from the site are shipped to customers individually, not in bulk, which is what Canada may curtail.
It doesn’t sound like these programs are catching on anyway, since so few people are using them. Either people don’t trust the foreign medications (which certainly makes sense since you can’t really know where they came from) or since they can buy them without the state program anyway they don’t feel like there’s any reason to participate.
