Canadian Drug FUD

Americans may remember George Bush’s comments this last election in which he said that America had to check to see if it was ok to import drugs from Canada. When he said that, my jaw dropped to the floor. Did he just say that we had to check and see if drugs from Canada were safe? We’re talking about Canada here, not some developing nation. I am pretty sure that the Canadians have equal or higher standards for their medicines; Europe usually does. Basically he didn’t want to upset the drug companies who had paid Republicans so much money to keep being able to charge Americans higher prices than our neighbors to the north and he didn’t want to upset Americans who might not vote for him if he flatly told them they wouldn’t be able to buy these cheaper drugs.

Recently I saw an ad by a major drug company in a magazine that was the biggest bit of FUD I’ve ever seen. For the uninitiated, FUD is an acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt. As an example of spreading FUD (which is what you do with it), Microsoft told China that if they went to Linux they would have to pay royalties when the SCO won its Lawsuit against IBM. Microsoft was spreading this fear and uncertainty around so that people would doubt Linux and get locked into another cycle of Microsoft products. Politicians also are guilty of spreading FUD. If they do something unpopular, just blame the terrorists and everyone calms down. Spend enough time on the internet and you’ll see the term thrown around.

Basically this ad says that this drug company, in your best interest (RIGHT!), decided to order some drugs from Canada from a website. Now, here’s where the FUD comes in: they say they followed a link from some spam!!! WTF is that?!? No one who is going to buy medication is going to actually buy from spam. They would buy from a Canadian drug store or something similar. But they are hoping that the average person misses this first part of the ad. The rest goes on to say that the company wasn’t really Canadian but based in evil Barbados, home of shady things like tax evasion banks. And the drugs actually came from Etheopia. Not only that, they were bootleg drugs with too much of this active ingrediant and too little of that one.

Good try at spreading some FUD, but you’ll not get me that easily! Following the principles of logic, that whole ad is based on the premise that the drugs were ordered from a spam website, which most people wouldn’t do. If the premise is false then, according to logic, the conclusion stemming from this premise must also be false. Afterall, how could one get truth from falseness? Nice try drug companies - how about lowering your prices so that people who aren’t rich can afford the latest in Cancer treatments that might actually save their lives instead of being stuck taking the three generations old stuff.

Just writing this gets me upset at them. We need a Sinclair of the 21st century to uncover all of this corruption in the medical industry before we end up in a very bad situation.