Plum Blossoms

Yet I wonder if the long-term ramifications of this news is actually beneficial to anyone. Drug companies may be swimming in profits, but it's profits built upon an increasingly unsustainable and socially unbeneficial foundation: imitation drugs for non-deadly conditions. You know, the drugs that are featured in all that spam you get in your mailbox these days. Instead of developing new treatments for Parkinson's and ALS, drug companies are stifled by the FDA and patent process into developing ED drugs and marginally better cold tablets.

Most drug markets in the world are heavily government regulated in pricing or profit margins. And I'm not talking about Third World countries: this is Canada and the EU and other well-off places that have similar costs of living to the US and can actually afford more expensive drugs. The result, unsurprisingly, is that the largest burden of drug costs are on Americans. A US scheme to reimport Canadian drugs, and the corresponding failure to accomplish its objectives, might cause enough of a shock to do two things:

• Other developed countries would consider loosening their drug price regulations, to avoid the more dire prospect of a full out price or quantity shock from US purchases.
• The failure of the reimportation scheme would finally force the FDA to review and revise its clinical trial process

Instead, we have now probably only convinced a small proportion of the pro-reimportation ostriches into realizing the folly of their scheme, while the rest of the developed world continue to get away with paying pennies for drugs at Americans' expense.