In searching online for Canadian pharmacies you can trust, you’ve no doubt come across various seals and accreditations. You’ve probably wondered which of these seals carry real weight and what organizations are behind them.

For Canadian pharmacies that sell to American consumers, three verification authorities are most important. Here is the seal of each, along with a brief description.

CIPA. The Canadian International Pharmacy Association (CIPA) was formed in 2002 to represent licensed Canadian pharmacies that sell prescription drugs to Americans by mail order. CIPA is the only national association of international pharmacies in Canada. CIPA members are licensed brick and mortar pharmacies that fill prescriptions for both Canadian and American patients. CIPA has testified before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures to promote legalizing the cross-border trade and to address safety issues.

MIPA. The Manitoba International Pharmacists Association (MIPA) is a professional association of licensed pharmacists, pharmacy students, and others dedicated to the provision of safe and affordable distance care for the improvement of health and well being of individuals of all ages from around the world. MIPA offers accreditation to licensed mail-order and Internet pharmacies based in the Canadian province of Manitoba.

PharmacyChecker. PharmacyChecker is the verification authority that Google uses in determining what pharmacies are allowed to advertise on its network. PharmacyChecker ensures that a pharmacy Web site dispenses through a licensed pharmacy; that it has a valid address and phone number on its site; that it protects the privacy of your personal medical information; and that it also protects your financial information.

All pharmacies in the Canadian Online Pharmacies network have been verified by PharmacyChecker.com as well as CIPA and/or MIPA. Join today to comparison shop for the best prices on prescription drugs.

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.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) last week released a report on online pharmacies that contained some startling claims.

Among other things, the NABP attempts to link Canadian online pharmacies to terrorism:

…purchasing medications from unknown and illegal sources via the Internet and other means is compromising the US medication distribution system and making US citizens vulnerable to bioterrorism attacks.

I guess it’s possible this is a valid threat — but frankly, it seems more like a scare tactic tied to a hot-button issue.

The NABP is widely quoted in the media on questions pertaining to Canadian pharmacies. Unfortunately, the NABP’s pattern has been to overhype the dangers of online pharmacies and to link unsafe, unlicensed foreign pharmacies with legitimate pharmacies that are licensed and in good standing with the Canadian government.

The NABP wants you to think that law-abiding, decent Canadian pharmacies are just as bad as the Russian crime syndicates that spam your inbox with misspelled solitications for Viagra. This is flat-out wrong.

The NABP’s “educational” efforts on online pharmacies have been subsidized, in no small part, by Big Pharma. Big Pharma loses money when consumers buy their medications from Canadian pharmacies. So the organization tends to take an extreme stance, overstating its case and confusing consumers.

In fact, the NABP report contains statements that appear to be simply inaccurate. For example, the press release touting the report states:

An alarming number of Internet drug outlets advertising on search engines flagrantly offer prescription medicine, including controlled substances, without a valid prescription… Many of these sites violate the recently adopted Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits the dispensing of controlled substance medications over the Internet without a valid prescription that has included a face-to-face physical examination.

I am curious which pharmacies and search engines the NABP is referring to, since Google is careful to only accept advertising from pharmacies that have been verified by PharmacyChecker.com. PharmacyChecker only approves pharmacies that meet stringent standards, including requiring an original doctor’s prescription based on an in-person consultation.

Certainly, if you do a Google search on Viagra or other medications that consumers commonly seek online, you will find the search results littered with online pharmacies — many of them fraudulent and claiming to be Canadian (when in most cases they aren’t). But this is not search engine advertising; these are organic search results, which Google has no control over.

Frankly, I think the evidence is clear that Google, with PharmacyChecker as its verification authority, has done a good job of separating legitimate pharmacies from fraudulent ones in its AdWords advertising.

So while you should certainly be cautious when buying drugs online, you shouldn’t believe every scary thing you read, either. For the truth about Canadian pharmacies, read this.

With a law to permit drug purchases from Canadian pharmacies expected to pass later this year, drugmakers are planning to fight back by retaliating against those Canadian pharmacies that choose to sell to Americans.

In the past, Big Pharma has sent letters to Canadian pharmacies telling them they would no longer receive quantity discounts if they sold drugs to U.S. consumers. These measures have been successful in bumping up the prices charged to U.S. consumers — but Americans still save an average of more than 50 percent by buying Canadian.

Word around the pharmaceutical industry is that drugmakers are plotting behind closed doors about how to respond to the Canadian pharmacy issue after the bill is passed. Will they clamp down even harder on Canadian pharmacies by restricting supplies? If they do, how will the FDA respond to what would clearly be an attempt to undermine the law?

It should definitely be interesting to watch. You can be sure that Big Pharma will do everything in its power to protect its double-digit profit margins.

This is a picture of U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, announcing the bipartisan bill that will officially allow U.S. consumers to purchase drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

He’s holding two bottles of Lipitor, both made at the same plant in Ireland, then distributed to pharmacies in Canada and the United States.

Said Dorgan:

I have in fact two bottles here, the only difference is in color, one is red and one is blue …The only difference is the U.S. consumer gets to pay more than twice as much for the identical pill put in the same bottle. That’s unfair we believe.

While the bill, when made law as expected, will officially make it legal to purchase medications from Canada, you don’t have to wait to save money on your drug purchases. Based on the current FDA guidelines, you have little to fear in buying Canadian medications for personal use.

Join us today!

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has produced an informative story looking at trends in Americans buying drugs from Canadian online pharmacies.

The story notes that at the start of decade, Americans were buying more than two million packages of prescription drugs annually from Canadian and other foreign pharmacies — adding up to a billion-dollar business. Since then, a rising Canadian dollar along with Medicare Part D have led to a decrease in Canadian drug purchases among Americans.

But the tide is shifting back in favor of Canadian online pharmacies, the CBC reports. The story points out that the Canadian dollar has fallen by 20 percent over the past six months, relative to the U.S. dollar, making Canadian drugs even more of a bargain. In addition, President Obama is eager to sign proposed legislation allowing Americans to purchase drugs legally from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

The CBC story includes a chart that compares prices for various medications at CanadaDrugs.com (a member of the Canadian Online Pharmacies network) and the U.S-based Drugstore.com.

American Prospect editor and healthcare policy opinion leader Ezra Klein recently had this to say about pending legislation that may, once and for all, legalize buying prescription drugs from Canada:

THE ABSURDITY OF DRUG IMPORTATION

Byron Dorgan’s office just sent out a press release noting that Obama supports the Dorgan-Snowe bill to allow importation of “lower-priced, Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs from other countries,” and they expect passage to be quick and clean. They’re probably right. But it’s always worth remembering what’s embedded in the drug importation — or, as some call it, “reimportation” — idea.

What the bill allows you to do, quite simply, is go to Canada and pick up a pack of Lipitor. But Lipitor is made by an American company in an American factory. Canada imports the drug. In theory, that should impose the extra cost on Canada and it should be cheaper in America. But it isn’t.

Canada has a national health care system that bargains down drug prices. They are so effective at it that it is literally cheaper for American consumers to buy back American-produced pharmaceuticals that drug companies have already sold at a profit to Canada than it is to buy from the producers directly. It’s inane. And allowing drug reimportation does not solve this problem. It dramatizes it.

We couldn’t agree more. As a commenter on Klein’s post puts it: “Drug re-importation is just outsourcing our law making. Nothing more than a straight admission that Congress is incapable of doing its job.”

We wholeheartedly agree.

We’d love it if Americans didn’t have to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

We’d love it if our legislators could stand up to Big Pharma instead of doing their bidding — and protecting their profits — at every turn.

We’d love it if Medicare were allowed to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma, to bring costs down to a reasonable level and eliminate the “doughnut hole” in drug coverage.

We’d love it if Congress were capable of doing its job — which should entail a complete overhaul of our broken healthcare system.

But until — and unless — that happens, the “absurd” solution of buying American drugs from Canada is the best answer we’ve got.

Because Big Pharma has successfully blocked the passage of bills legalizing the purchase of prescription drugs from Canada, American consumers are technically violating the law when they purchase their medications from Canadian pharmacies.

However, since polls consistently show that 80 percent of Americans want the right to buy Canadian drugs, the federal government is careful in their handling of this issue. In fact, no individual has been prosecuted since 1988 for re-importing prescription drugs for their personal use.

The FDA has issued enforcement guidelines that effectively allow Americans to purchase their drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies, if the following seven conditions are met:

1) The drugs are for personal use.
2) The individual seeking to import the drugs has a valid prescription from a licensed U.S. physician.
3) The quantity of drugs does not exceed a three (3) months supply.
4) There is no known commercialization or promotion to persons residing in the U.S. by those involved in the distribution of the drugs.
5) The individual seeking to import the drugs affirms in writing that it is for the patient’s own personal use.
6) The individual seeking to import the drugs provides the name and address of the doctor licensed in the U.S. responsible for his or her treatment with the product.
7) The drugs do not contain a narcotic or controlled substance.

Personal Use

Drugs imported from Canada must be for your own use. You may not import drugs for resale. You may not import drugs for family, friends or any other third party. Any importation other than for your own use is a violation of drug import regulations.

Valid Prescription

You must have a valid prescription from your doctor. Importing drugs without a prescription from a licensed U.S. physician violates FDA regulations. In Canada, any pharmacy that dispenses prescription drugs without a prescription violates Canadian regulations. Online pharmacies offering to dispense prescription drugs without a prescription should be avoided.

Quantity

To ensure that prescription drugs are imported for personal use, the quantity you may import is limited to a three months supply. Any shipments over three months supply may be deemed importation for resale, which violates personal import regulations. If your prescription allows refills, you may import up to three refills, one every three months. To import more than three refills, you would need another prescription from your doctor.

Commercialization and Promotion

If those involved in the distribution of the drugs being imported conduct commercialization or promotion to persons residing in the U.S., the shipment may be held by customs and/or denied entry. Canadian or overseas pharmacies that advertise to you through direct mail, unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) or any other form of commercialization or promotion are in violation of regulations and are best avoided.

Controlled Substances

Narcotics and other controlled substances are subject to DEA jurisdiction and cannot be imported under personal importation regulations. Such items may be held by customs and referred to the DEA for investigation. Exporting narcotics is a violation of Canadian export regulations, and any pharmacy that offers narcotics for export should be avoided.

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