Congressional Statement On The Importation Of Prescription Drugs

INTRODUCTION

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am John M. Taylor, Associate Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA or the Agency). With me is Mr. William K. Hubbard, Associate Commissioner for Policy and Planning at FDA. We appreciate having this opportunity to discuss with you the issues relating to the importation of prescription drugs into the United States and the use of the Internet to facilitate the sale of these drugs.

At FDA, our statutory responsibility is to assure the American public that the drug supply is safe, secure, and reliable. For more than 60 years, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act has ensured that Americans can be confident that, when they use an FDA-approved drug, the medicine will be safe and effective and will work as intended in treating their illness and preventing complications. In carrying out this responsibility, FDA also works to do all we can under the law to make medicines accessible and help doctors and patients to use them as effectively as possible, through such steps as expanding access to generic medicines, reducing the time and cost of showing that new medicines are safe and effective, and providing up-to-date information for health professionals and patients to obtain the benefits and avoid the risks associated with powerful medicines.

That is the primary mission of the thousands of dedicated staff, including leading health care experts, doctors, economists and scientists who work tirelessly at FDA in public service for the American people . FDA remains strongly concerned about unapproved, imported pharmaceuticals whose safety and effectiveness cannot be assured because they are outside the legal structure and regulatory resources provided by Congress.

IMPORTATION OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Sixty-five years ago, Congress responded to widespread instances of unsafe drugs by directing FDA to implement a system for assuring that Americans have a drug supply they can trust will not harm them. Over forty years ago, Congress required that legal drugs be proven to be effective as well, because modern medicines – when they are produced, distributed, prescribed, and used properly – should not only be safe but effective in the treatment of disease. More recently, in 1988, Congress enacted the Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA) to establish additional safeguards to prevent substandard, ineffective, or counterfeit drugs from entering the U.S. Under PDMA, it is illegal for anyone other than the drug’s original manufacturer to re-import a prescription drug into the U.S. that was manufactured in the U.S.

This law was enacted with strong bipartisan support because of high-profile cases of unsafe and ineffective drugs entering the U.S. in large volumes. In one instance, over 2 million unapproved and potentially unsafe and ineffective Ovulen-21 “birth control” tablets from Panama were distributed into the U.S. as American goods returned. In another case, a counterfeit version of Ceclor, a widely used antibiotic at the time, found its way into the U.S. drug distribution from a foreign source. Over the years, FDA’s dedicated professional staff has employed PDMA and other authorities to build a drug safety infrastructure to ensure that Americans enjoy the highest-quality drug supply in the world.

Unfortunately, the drug supply is under unprecedented attack from a variety of increasingly sophisticated threats. This is evident in the recent significant increase in efforts to introduce counterfeit drugs into the U.S. market. FDA has seen its number of counterfeit drug investigations increase four-fold since the late 1990s. Although counterfeiting was once a rare event, we are increasingly seeing large supplies of counterfeit versions of finished drugs being manufactured and distributed by well-funded and elaborately organized networks. At the same time, inadequately regulated foreign Internet sites have also become portals for unsafe and illegal drugs.

For example, FDA recently worked with domestic and international authorities to shut down a website that was advertising “FDA-approved” and safe “European” birth control pills and other drugs, but was actually responsible for importing ineffective, counterfeit drugs. Evidence strongly suggests that the volume of these foreign drug importations is increasing steadily, presenting an increasingly difficult challenge for Agency field personnel at ports-of-entry, mail facilities, and international courier hubs, and our laboratory analysts and border and law enforcement partners.

FDA is doing its best to use its limited international authorities to stop the increasing flow of violative drugs into this country, but the task is daunting. Each day, thousands of individual packages containing prescription drugs are imported illegally into the U.S., simply because the sheer volume has grown to exceed the capability of FDA field personnel to properly process. FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs has inspectors working in the field who perform investigations pertaining to imported prescription drugs, a job that is not limited to inspections at ports-of-entry.

CONCLUSION

The standards for drug review and approval in the U.S. are the best in the world, and the safety of our drug supply mirrors these high standards. The employees of FDA constantly strive to maintain these high standards. However, a growing number of Americans are obtaining prescription medications from foreign sources. U.S. consumers often seek out Canadian suppliers, sources that purport to be Canadian, or other foreign sources that they believe to be reliable. Often, the imported drugs arriving through the mail, through private express couriers, or by passengers arriving at ports-of-entry are unapproved drugs that may not be subject to any reliable regulatory oversight. FDA cannot assure the safety of drugs purchased from such sources.

The vigilance of FDA and Customs inspectors is an important tool in detecting imported products that violate the FD&C Act. Given the available resources and competing priorities facing these agencies, however, experience shows that inspectors are unable to visually examine many of the parcels containing prescription drug products that arrive through the mail and private courier services each day. The growing volume of unapproved imported drugs, which often are generated from sales via the Internet, presents a formidable challenge.

The nature of Internet technology presents law enforcement and policy makers with unique challenges. FDA is grappling with these challenges, and we must strive to carefully balance consumer access to information and products with protecting the public health. We are aggressively using our existing educational, compliance and enforcement tools to combat the proliferation of unsafe or fraudulent pharmaceuticals on the Internet, and we will continue to evaluate what changes in our procedures, regulations, or the law might be appropriate to enhance our efforts. Our goal is to ensure that the protections afforded to consumers who purchase drugs from their corner drugstore also extend to consumers in the electronic marketplace.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to responding to any questions you may have.

Reference for Prescription Drug Article

U.S.Food and Drug Administration

Learn More About Prescription Drugs