Giving Compass' Take:

• Roger Bate argues that personal medicine importation is illegal for economic, not safety, reasons and should be made legal to help low-income individuals. 

• How can funders best work to increase access to affordable medicine? How can the safety of imported medicine be ensured? 

• Learn about drug prices in the U.S.


Modern telecommunications and shipping networks have simplified buying almost anything over the web from overseas, yet it remains illegal to import medicines without explicit authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. While the US government does not generally enforce this prohibition for cases involving limited personal use, the restriction remains, and the practice is widely discouraged. Under the banner of patient safety, industry-backed lobby groups have advocated for and caused search engines such as Google and Bing to discourage people from buying overseas. Further, payment organizations such as Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa and delivery companies such as FedEx and the US Postal Service are being pushed by government bodies to make purchasing and delivery from foreign sites more difficult.

This problem has worsened because of recent responses to the opioid epidemic that are fueled in part by the pharmaceutical industry, the same group that benefits from the current restrictive system. However, a growing body of evidence, including empirical evidence in this report, demonstrates that foreign pharmacies credentialed by independent groups sell safe medicines. Furthermore, as high drug prices increasingly come to dominate conversations on health reform, politicians on both the left and right are beginning to see the benefits of limited personal importation.

This report argues that rather than advancing patient safety, the main reason importation is illegal is economic. By arguing that the same logic justifying global price discrimination for pharmaceutical products applies within countries and among them, I show that it is both equitable and efficient for underinsured (usually low-income) Americans to pay less than they currently do and, further, that personal importation achieves this aim without overhauling America’s existing drug framework or compromising patient safety.

This report has established that it is safe to buy medicines from credentialed web pharmacies and that the reason importation remains illegal without explicit authorization from the FDA is due to economics and politics, not safety. While the US government does not generally enforce this prohibition for cases involving limited personal use, the restriction remains, and the practice is widely discouraged.

Under the banner of patient safety, industry-backed lobby groups have advocated for and caused search engines such as Google and Bing to discourage people from buying overseas. Further, payment organizations such as Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal and delivery companies such as FedEx and the US Postal Service are also being pushed by government bodies to make purchasing and delivery from foreign sites more difficult.