Ed Wallace, a Dallas/Fort Worth radio talk show host, recently penned a great column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram called “The Myth of Free Trade,” in which he lambasts U.S. government hypocrisy on trade policy and endorses Americans purchasing their prescription medications from Canada.

Here’s an excerpt:

Elected officials support many enduring myths that sound not just good but economically reasonable. They oversimplify them in business logic that helps America’s financial future sound potentially exciting. Once you get past the ostensible intelligence of the sales pitch, though, the facts of the real world intrude. That they are myths may be scarier than anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but they are -– equally fanciful tales.

The first is the myth of free trade…

Remember when it was big news how many American senior citizens were traveling into Canada to fill their prescriptions? In Canada they could buy their prescription drugs at incredible discounts, both because of the exchange rate and because the Canadian government negotiates lower costs on those drugs in its citizens’ behalf.

Many of our elderly simply couldn’t afford to buy those life-saving drugs in the States. And you’d think Americans would have every right to shop in Canada for cheaper drugs: NAFTA was sold to us as enabling total free trade between us, Canada and Mexico.

Yet, as far as Washington was concerned, old folks could go to Whistler, Canada, and purchase ski gear all they wanted –- but don’t even try to cross the border for cheaper drugs that was proving to save lives.

You tell ‘em, Ed!

Rick Coddington, a columnist for the Mountain Mail newspaper of Socorro, New Mexico (population 8,879), is a political conservative with a wry independent streak.

He’s also — officially, at least — a lawbreaker. Because he is proud to tell all who will listen that he purchases his prescription medications from Canadian pharmacies.

As he writes in a recent column:

I buy drugs from Canada for pennies on the dollar. Even with prescription drug coverage, I can buy –- outright -– drugs from Canada for less than the co-pay costs to get them here! What does that tell you about the cost of prescriptions? It tells me the drugs actually cost less than the insurance co-pays! If you look at the “list price” of the drugs, you can see (in some cases) the profit is 300 to 400 percent!

The only difference in the drugs is the profit. The Canadian pharmacy from which I have been buying for years is obviously making money. In contrast to that, if you come down to the good-old U.S., not only are we paying three or four times what the drugs are worth, we are being taxed into oblivion to “bail out” the poor corporations that would just go broke if we tax-saps weren’t shoveling money to them.

Fortunately for Rick and the countless other Americans who save money every day by buying their medications from Canada, the FDA effectively permits individuals to purchase supplies of up to 90 days of their prescription drugs, even though the practice is officially against the law.

With U.S. public approval for Canadian drugs running at more than 70 percent, Washington politicians know they’d be messing with a hornet’s nest if they tried to stop you.

Many Americans don’t realize that advertising for prescription drugs aimed at consumers was prohibited in the United States until 1997. The reason was that regulators feared Big Pharma’s billions of ad dollars would lead to the over-prescription of drugs. Based on the fact that the average number of prescriptions taken by Americans has increased from 8.9 in 1997 to 12.6 in 2007, one would have to agree with the regulators.

For the past 12 years, the United States has shared with New Zealand the dubious distinction of being the only two industrialized nations that permit drug companies to advertise to consumers.

Interestingly, though, I learned the other day that this isn’t completely true. Big Pharma has also found a way to advertise in the Canadian market — and is even allowed to advertise so-called black-box drugs that can’t be advertised in the United States.

The Vancouver Sun reports that “drug companies can do in Canada what they can’t in the U.S.: advertise prescription drugs even if they carry risks for life-threatening complications, according to a University of B.C. study.”

The article goes on:

Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is illegal in Canada, but a federal policy change in 2000 allowed a loophole that lets drug companies state the brand name of the drug and a bit of other information such as price — as long as it doesn’t tell consumers what it is used for. It’s called reminder advertising and the change was intended to encourage medication price competition…

Such advertising, which routinely tells consumers to talk to their doctors about the product, is prohibited in the U.S. for any drugs that have been ordered by the Food and Drug Administration to carry a black-box label containing a warning about any serious complications and adverse events that come to light after the drug has been approved for marketing.

For example, [the black-box drug] Celebrex, which is used for pain and inflammation, is one of dozens of drugs that show up in Canadian reminder ads but not in the U.S…

“This review of 12 years of advertising spending in Canada is a sobering reality check: many of the most heavily advertised products have been subject to regulatory warnings of serious risk,” the study’s authors said…

Research shows patients who see ads for drugs are far more likely to ask their doctors for them and receive a prescription.

I have a feeling the Canadian government will be closing this loophole in the wake of this report.