With fakes of the cancer drug Avastin popping up in U.S. clinics in the past few months, patients are naturally worried about whether their medicines are safe.  Considering eighty percent of the ingredients in U.S. medicines come from overseas – mostly from China and India because their products are generally...

Whenever the Thai government defiesforeign drug patents and creates its own cheap copies of drugs, it endangers the patients who need the drugs and undermines drug discovery.

The perceived short-term benefits of drug reimportation are likely to be outweighed by the negative longer-term effects of importing price controls.

The House is tempted by a terrible idea.

Reimportating drugs would mean importing foreign price controls, which would have disastrous consequences for future drug research and development.

Ineffective drugs take lives, waste money and make precious cures useless. Drugs have been recycled after their expiry date; they have been contaminated with fatal toxins; they have been made too weak or with no active ingredient at all.

With 100,000 patients dying every year from dangerous medicines, it is time to take concrete actions. Establishing a treaty against fake medicines should be the first step.

The reality is that we simply do not know how efficacious most  drugs really are.