Federal Officials Urge Wisconsin Not to Import Canadian Drugs MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Federal officials and advocates for state pharmacists warned the governor Monday to stop trying to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, saying the practice is illegal and the drugs are untested by American standards.  Gov. Jim Doyle planned to meet representatives of Canadian drug companies Tuesday to explore importing cheaper drugs. Several other states are pursuing similar plans.  Drugs cost up to 50 per cent less in Canada than the United States because of government price controls.  Doyle wants to use the cheaper drugs to reduce the costs of health programs for state workers and the poor.   But Tom McGinnis, the federal Food and Drug Administration's director of pharmacy affairs, said Canada has different standards for drugs, and people who buy them there actually might get drugs manufactured in other countries.  Federal law bars consumers from bringing foreign drugs into the United States.   "Safety is the key issue here," McGinnis said Monday.   Dan Leistikow, a spokesman for Doyle, said the laws against drug importation are ambiguous. The federal government has done nothing to reduce prescription drug prices, leaving Wisconsin on its own, he said.  The state Department of Health and Family Services spends $600 million US on prescriptions for medical assistance programs. The state likely will spend about $115 million on prescriptions for state employees this year and $128 million next year, Doyle has said.  "Even if it's just a five or 10 per cent savings we could get by going to Canada, that's huge savings for taxpayers," Leistikow said.  So far, no state has begun buying its drugs from Canada. But Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and now Wisconsin all are looking into it. In July, Springfield, Mass., became the country's first city to buy Canadian drugs for its employee health plan.  McGinnis warned that federal law prohibits importing drugs from Canada. He said importation could lead to potentially harmful drug counterfeits flooding American markets. The FDA doesn't have the money or the resources to inspect incoming shipments, he said.  He claimed many pharmacies in Canada really are mail- or online-order warehouses stocked with drugs that may have come from elsewhere in the world.  "We don't want it to be a buyer-beware system," he said.  Andy Troszok, vice-president of standards with the Canadian International Pharmacy Association said Canadian drugs are perfectly safe. The association represents licensed Canadian pharmacies that do business with Americans.  The FDA should criticize American mail-order pharmacies before it attacks Canadian ones, he said. He questioned why the FDA and border agents don't confiscate thousands of medications that come over the Canadian-U.S. border every day.  "The law hasn't been enforced in decades," he said. "It was created just to stop counterfeit drugs, not to prevent needy Americans from getting access to medication."  Christopher Decker is the executive vice-president of the Pharmacy Society of Wisconsin, which represents about 4,000 Wisconsin pharmacists. He said American pharmacists and the personalized care they give would be eliminated if people started getting their drugs from Canadian warehouses.  Leistikow said the state wants to find safe drug pharmacies in Canada. The governor hopes to figure out exactly how during Tuesday's meeting, Leistikow said.  "The state is not going on Google and looking up websites," he said. This story originally came from Associated Press ... Return to the Media Section

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