Find the dead Canadians.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Here's a suggestion for a way to troubleshoot the U.S. Senate's gutting of legislation that would have allowed consumers to purchase prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized nations: Begin with a dragnet for dead Canadians.

The bodies ought to be easy enough to find. With more than 33 million residents exposed to prescription drugs that U.S. senators believe are too dangerous to sell to Americans, Canadians must be dropping dead by the dozens while waiting in line for hockey tickets. That's reason enough for Americans to continue paying the highest prescription drug prices in the world.

Thank goodness, 49 safety-con- scious members of the Senate on Monday had the courage to keep the plague of dead Canadians from spreading south into the American heartland.

OK, as far as anyone knows, no Canadians actually have died from taking Canadian prescription drugs, many of which are made in the United States and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA acknowledges that it can't find a single American who's been harmed by taking drugs purchased from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Still, it seemed as if the bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, took great pains to address safety concerns.

Their proposal specified that drug importers and exporters would have to register with the FDA, and only FDA-approved drugs could be bought and sold. The bill required mandatory inspection of importers' and exporters' places of business at least 12 times a year, and it called for drug packaging that would contain track-and-trace technology to help thwart counterfeiting.

That wasn't enough for Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran, who added a "poison pill" amendment requiring the secretary of Health and Human Services to certify the safety and cost benefits for any imported drug. Previous health secretaries have testified in Congress that such certification is beyond the capabilities of the FDA.

Duh. The FDA can't even make such guarantees about drugs manufactured in the United States. As Dorgan noted in response to the 49-40 vote approving Cochran's amendment, the Health and Human Services secretary also "couldn't certify there is no risk with spinach coming from Mexico or strawberries coming from any other country."

To underscore the absurdity of Cochran's amendment, Dorgan countered on Tuesday with three amendments of his own. One would require HHS to certify the safety of medications sold in the United States (which it admits it cannot do). The second would require medications to include labels that indicate the nation where they were manufactured (pharmaceutical companies currently sell medications in the United States that were manufactured in other nations). The third would require the placement of tracking devices on medications to prevent counterfeiting.

The Cochran amendment wasn't really about ensuring the safety of imported drugs. It was about protecting the profits of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, one of the biggest contributors to political campaigns. Once again, those contributions have paid off handsomely.