Drugs without borders: When prescription drugs go over the line

To ease drug price concerns, congressional lawmakers seek to legalize personal reimportation of prescriptions. But safety concerns persist.

By Markian Hawryluk, AMNews staff. Oct. 22/29, 2001.

Sitting in a bar during his visit to Mexico, Toby Atkins, MD, saw a sight not listed in any travel brochure. Americans were coming into the bar, popping pills out of blister packs and dropping them into empty prescription bottles for the trip back across the border.

But these smugglers weren't dealing in illegal drugs. The pills they were importing were prescription medications. And their motivation was not to make money, but to save it. They and thousands like them buy drugs in foreign countries at cut-rate prices and bring them back to the United States for their personal use, with little regard for their own safety.

"When you start moving much out of the same cultural sphere that we're in, the names on the medicine, the uses of the medicine, the rules and regulations on the medicine suddenly change dramatically," said Dr. Atkins, a family physician in Bangor, Maine.

The scene Dr. Atkins witnessed could become much more common.

For the second consecutive year, lawmakers looking for a quick fix to rising pharmaceutical costs are ready to open U.S. borders to increased prescription drug traffic. The renewed debate has placed physicians in the uncomfortable position of choosing between maximizing safety or minimizing cost.

Despite the fact that bringing any prescription drug into the country is technically illegal, about 2 million parcels containing regulated products enter the United States each year via the mail, the Food and Drug Administration estimates. Thousands more are brought in by individuals crossing the border. [...]