Iowa's Prescription for Low Cost Medicine
by John Drury

Currently, there are only four U.S. states that openly encourage their citizens to buy prescription drugs from Canada: Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Iowa is not on the list, but I believe that it should be.

In the recent presidential election, we heard Bush use one of his many scare tactics saying that if we are going to import drugs from Canada, he wants to make sure “it cures you, and doesn’t kill you.” He said his worry is that a drug might “look like it’s from Canada but it might be from a third world.”

While that’s a very good scare tactic, and undoubtedly worked very well in his campaign, it is, like many of his scare tactics, not based on any sort of fact.

Predictably, the prescription drug companies have only added to the fear with full page ads like the one shown here. One way to get people to stop getting their drugs from Canada would be to tell them they are from a third world country, schemes the pharmaceutical companies.

According to a recent Day to Day news story aired on NPR on December 7, the opposite is true. Most of the drugs that Americans buy from Canada are actually made in the United States, exported to Canada, and then get re-imported back to the United States.

Canadians are baffled by our ignorance, and offended by the suggestion that their pharmacies aren’t safe and that it is some sort of prescription drug grab bag free for all. Their government regulates the quality and the price of their prescription drugs. We, on the other hand, turn our government over to the pharmaceutical companies, letting them write our laws and set our policies, all at our own expense. Oddly enough, our high drug prices—which seniors cannot afford—are effectively subsidizing the low-cost prescriptions that Canadians enjoy.

Iowa is in the top five in the percentage of its elderly population. Since the federal government has failed its people on this issue, the state of Iowa has a moral obligation to meet the needs of Iowans who cannot afford the drugs that are prescribed to them. It is time for the state of Iowa to join our neighbors and make lower cost, prescription drugs from Canada readily accessible to our seniors.