Marc Kealey Online

In response to the growing concerns over the cross-border prescription drug trade, an event was hosted at the National Press Club where Dr. Marv Shepherd, an expert on the importation of drugs from the University of Texas, spoke to a Canadian audience about the negative impact of drug exports to the US.

We have been voicing concerns for the past two years about the detrimental impact of the spread of cross-border trade in prescription drugs, and more specifically drug re-importation into the United States via Internet pharmacies.

“Our message to the government of Canada is to move quickly to ban all export of prescription drugs, said Marc Kealey. “This will in effect eliminate the potential risk to the Canadian supply of prescription drugs, and as importantly, eliminate the potential risk on patient safety due to the unregulated internet pharmacy trade.”

Prescription drugs are a highly political issue in the U.S. because of their high prices and cases of Americans going across the border to Canada for treatment or to buy drugs have been growing.

One of the biggest problems associated with importation is people never know exactly where the drugs are coming from.  There is no guarantee that imported drugs are safe.  Just because there is a Canadian flag on the website, doesn’t mean that the source of the drug is from Canada.  Therein lies the problem for Americans – who may not be certain that the drugs they receive via Internet Pharmacy may be real.

A country with 33 million citizens should not be supplying the prescription needs of a country with 280 million,” said Kealey. “Raiding Canada’s medicine cabinet will not solve health care problems in the U.S.”

This has been the ongoing message that Marc Kealey has delivered to media and to stakeholders across the country and in several states in the United States, including Texas, Maine, Florida, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois, Nevada and Vermont.