Texas State Senate Passes Dangerous Foreign Drug Importation Program

Map of Texas with prescription pill bottle to the left. The bottle a label with a maple leaf that's peeling away to reveal a skull and crossbones.

With the passage of HB 25 in the Texas State Senate and Governor Abbott’s impending signature, Texas is poised to become the seventh state in the U.S. to attempt to create a program to import medicine from Canada. This policy has failed in six other states, cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and drawn opposition from the Canadian government.

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PSM analysis of Texas legislation HB 25, foreign drug importation

Map of Texas with prescription pill bottle to the left. The bottle a label with a maple leaf that's peeling away to reveal a skull and crossbones.

H.B. 25 would require Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission to design a program for bulk importing prescription medicines under 21 USC 384 of the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, more commonly known as a Section 804 State Importation Program (SIP). Below, we outline the many reasons this proposal is unsafe and unworkable.

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Why has Florida paid 27 million dollars for an empty warehouse?

image of Florida governor with text: Over $24 million spent, no medicine provided to patients"

When Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB19 into law in June 2019, he said that Florida was leading “the way toward affordable prescription drugs,” but over the past three years not a single person has received even one pill imported from Canada, and the state has spent millions.

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The Hollow Promise of Drug Importation Proposals

Older man in dark suit with crossed arms

Tom Kubic—an FBI veteran, former president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Security Institute, and president of PSM’s governing board—has the experience to know that the risks of drug importation are “unacceptably high” and the potential rewards are “virtually nil.”

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Director of Health and Science Policy at Citizens Against Government Waste Calls Drug Importation Dangerous

Instead of wasting time and money on dangerous and faulty importation proposals, Congress should encourage the FDA to speed up the drug approval process and reduce the cost of program and application fees for future drug development. In 2022, the application fee for a human drug application will cost $1.6 million for drugs that don’t require clinical data and $3.1 million for medicines that do need clinical data.

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