Vermont defies the FDA and sues to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada

Vermont now joins five other states who are defying the FDA with a plan to import prescription drugs from Canada to lower the costs of prescription drugs for its state employees and retirees. In fact, Vermont has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is seeking a court order that will require the adoption of regulations allowing Vermont's prescription drug importation plan.

The FDA, of course, continues to insist that prescription drugs from Canada are somehow far more dangerous than the very same drugs from the United States, even though Canadian pharmacies have been studied and shown to meet or exceed the very same safety requirements recognized by U.S. pharmacies.

Clearly, the momentum here is against the FDA. More and more states are standing up and accusing the FDA of doing little more than attempting to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies it is supposed to be regulating. In fact, it is blatantly obvious to anyone familiar with the situation that the FDA's mission here is to protect pharmaceutical profits and not to protect public health. If the FDA were really interested in helping the public, it would find ways to allow the importation of more affordable drugs from other countries rather than seeking to block them and effectively monopolize the U.S. drug market.

This is why the FDA is now grasping at straws and coming up with ridiculous claims such as the one that says terrorists will somehow target prescription drugs from Canada. I'm not making this up -- the FDA has actually made this claim as part of its argument that prescription drugs should not be allowed to be imported from other countries, thereby forcing U.S. consumers to pay exorbitant prices for such drugs in the United States.

Of course, importing prescription drugs is really only a stop-gap measure to fighting the skyrocketing costs of health care (or "sick-care") in the United States. Until we actually start investing in disease prevention, we will never reign in the rising costs, no matter how cheaply we can source these prescription drugs. Remember that for every dollar that's currently being spent on prescription drugs, we as a nation could have spent one penny on prevention and avoided the whole disease in the first place.