With FUD in full force, the pharmaceutical industry is promoting scare stories of how drugs purchased from online pharmacies are somehow more dangerous than drugs purchased at monopoly prices in the U.S. If they can scare people enough, they figure, folks will buy from U.S. pharmacies "just to be safe."
Of course, it's all propaganda: drugs from Canada are just as safe (or dangerous, depending on how you look at it) as prescription drugs from the U.S. In fact, prescription drugs from both countries are highly toxic and extremely dangerous for your healthy, but the drugs from Canada are no more dangerous than those from the U.S., that's for sure.
The deception here is that the spinmeisters talk up the deaths caused by counterfeit drugs, but they never dare mention the 100,000 deaths caused by prescription drugs in the U.S. each year caused by drugs purchased in the United States. It's a classic tactic of misdirection. And lawmakers are buying it hook, line and sinker.
- For relatives of two witnesses, that danger proved deadly.
- ``Never did I think you could so easily get prescription drugs on the Internet,'' Francine H. Haight told the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
- Giuliani, a consultant to the U.S. drug industry, said online pharmacies can be a big source of controlled drugs for illicit dealers.
- In a report delivered to the panel yesterday, the General Accounting Office said that its investigators ordered 68 prescriptions but often got unapproved drugs or medicines in damaged packages, without labels or instructions for proper use.