Yes, it is true that there are some rogue companies on the internet masquerading as Canadian pharmacies that are actually Mexican pharmacies that don’t even have a doctor and pharmacist review your medical history before sending you the medicine. But the FDA could easily set up a legal Canadian-American drug trade where the FDA makes it legal for Americans to buy their drugs from a select group of Canadian pharmacies that buy all their products directly from the U.S. or manufacture their drugs in the facilities of Canada’s major drug companies.

This isn’t likely to happen, however, because we have an administration in Washington that is for the corporations and by the corporations, and an FDA whose sole purpose is to protect the windfall profits of the drug manufacturers while allowing drug companies to make and sell hugely overpriced, noxious drugs that kill us, like Vioxx and others they’ve allowed onto the market that produce harmful and sometimes lethal side effects.

If the FDA sponsored a system of legal and regulated prescription drug buying from Canada, this would force American pharmaceutical companies to drop their prices by 80% to compete, resulting in a better situation for the consumer. The drug companies would still make profits, because the demand for the drugs would go up tremendously if they suddenly became affordable for people without health insurance, but the profits wouldn’t quite be the same.

For the time being, Americans will continue to have to choose between buying food for their family or buying health insurance they can’t afford that hardly covers the costs of the drugs they can’t buy.