By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, July 1, 2005 9:54 AM

Canadian Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh did just what he promised last week, laying out a plan Wednesday to restrict bulk pharmaceutical sales to Americans -- a step aimed in part at preventing U.S. consumers from buying drugs from online pharmacies based north of the border.

Here are the details, according to The Washington Post: "The measure would stop the plans of a variety of U.S. municipalities and states to reduce drug costs by tapping the Canadian market. Those plans are awaiting the approval of legislation in Congress. The minister also said he was drafting regulations aimed at controlling individual purchases of Canadian prescription drugs over the Internet, as made by about 2 million Americans last year. He said Canada would toughen its rules to require 'an established doctor/patient relationship for any cross-border drug sales.' Currently, patients who receive a prescription from a U.S. doctor can have it filled over the Internet, with the prescription endorsed by a Canadian doctor and the drugs mailed from Canada directly to the patient."

Dosanjh told reporters that "Canada cannot be a drug store for the United States of America; 280 million people cannot expect us to supply drugs to them on a continuous, uncontrolled basis," the Buffalo News reported.

Why shouldn't we? As the Boston Globe reminded us, Americans pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world.

The eternal quest for a bargain is why the Internet tends to treat stop signs more like yield signs. The Buffalo News and the New York Times noted that Dosanjh's plan could give a boost to online pharmacies in other countries, including places that the Bush administration says do not meet shipping and safety standards mandated in the United States.

Here's an example from the News: "Charlie Bell, an Internet broker of foreign drug sales who operates out of the Rochester suburb of Webster, said he has already turned from Canada to the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to obtain name brands at cut-rate prices."

Or, the rules could prompt online pharmacies currently doing business from Canada to move their inventories to other countries.

A Canadian Press story quoted Pat Martin, a New Democratic Party legislator from Manitoba, as saying that Dosanjh's plan could signal the industry's "death knell" in Canada. "He sounds bound and determined, based on anecdotal evidence and based on hypothetical shortages, to find a way to undermine this important western [Canadian] industry," Martin told the CP wire service. Manitoba, as I have pointed out before, is home to much of the online Canadian pharmacy business. Also from Martin: "This industry needs a champion, not an executioner." Dosanjh was quoted in many news outlets as saying it was not his intention to kill the Internet pharmacy business.

Here are some details on how much money we're talking about, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune: "Nearly 2 million Americans order prescription drugs from Canada each year, realizing savings of 20 percent to 80 percent off drug prices in this country. All together, Canada's Internet pharmacies rack up annual sales of about $1 billion, with another $500 million coming from so-called foot traffic across the border."

The Buffalo News said that American "walk-ins" to Canadian drugstores must have a Canadian doctor's signature, but quoted Dosanjh as saying the some Canadian doctors "are abusing the system through bulk Internet sales. 'Several doctors are known to have signed several hundred prescriptions a day to facilitate these sales across the border,' he said."

Here's more from the News: "The new orders will have only limited effect on sales by drug stores in nearby Fort Erie. Gerard Longval, pharmacist at Zeller's on Garrison Road near the Peace Bridge, said that only about 3 percent of his sales are to American visitors and they all must have prescriptions. 'It could be higher,' Longval said, 'but the government has been trying to discourage' sales to Americans. A druggist at Fort Erie's Wal-Mart store, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said occasional busloads of seniors from the United States shop for drugs at his store. 'Yes, that does happen,' he said. 'I discourage it.'"

The message didn't play well with people who like to save money by shopping in Canada, the Press-Enterprise in California's Inland Empire quoted a few locals: "'I'd just have to pay more' if Canadian imports stop,' said Oretta Baker of Grand Terrace. 'What else can I do?' Baker lives on Social Security and buys about $300 worth of drugs a month, including some from Canada, she said. She estimates that the drugs she orders from north of the border are about 40 percent cheaper than the American equivalents. ... 'Seniors have learned what they need to do, what they have to do undercover, when it's not a legitimized process,' said Lu Molberg, director of the Riverside County Office on Aging. A closed border likely won't deter seniors from finding cheaper drugs elsewhere, including Mexico, Molberg said. And the debatable safety of cheaper foreign drugs would be a risk worth taking for some seniors if they were forced to miss doses because of the cost. 'Human nature is ruled by doing what you need to do in the short run to survive. That's just how we're built,' she said."

Someone should tell Dosanjh, President Bush and the pharmaceutical companies that support them that no one has yet found a cure for that ill. Dosanjh should drop this strange plan, and the administration should drop its support. It'll take a lot more than a border skirmish over the Internet to bring drug prices down and make healthcare affordable for all Americans, but maybe this is the symptom that could lead to some radical surgery.

Two-thirds of college and university students experience no ethical qualms about downloading copyrighted material for free. This dog-bites-man news comes from the Business Software Alliance, which also reported in a recent survey that about half of college-age respondents believe that it's fine to download and share pirated material on computers at school and work, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

P-I reporter Brad Wong found a good example: "University of Washington computer science student Peter Davis has his Apple iPod packed with nearly 3,000 songs and enjoys spending time at his apartment downloading television shows and movies to his personal computer with the help of file-sharing programs. The 22-year-old isn't bothered too much that the songs, television shows and movies hold copyrights or that industry executives have vowed to fight this piracy. 'There are so many people doing this that the risks are so low,' he said. 'It's like shoplifting without the risk or retribution.'"

Dude, you are so sued.

In fact, the Recording Industry Association of America announced on Wednesday that it sued 784 people for illegally sharing music files, bringing the total lawsuit count since late 2003 to more than 12,000 sued. Pretty soon the RIAA can steal an idea from McDonald's: "The Recording Industry: Billions and billions sued."

Not only that, Reuters reported that police in more than a dozen countries arrested suspected music and movie pirates: "More computers were seized on Wednesday in Australia, Israel, Germany, South-Korea, Norway, France, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Poland, Canada and Hungary, said a spokeswoman for the ministry, which is responsible for preventing economic crime."  

According to the AP, ''the Justice Department 'is striking at the top of the copyright piracy supply chain -- a distribution chain that provides the vast majority of illegal digital content now available online,' Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said." The story said the raids targeted "warez" groups -- "a kind of underground Internet co-op that is set up to trade in copyrighted materials. [They] are extraordinarily difficult to infiltrate because users talk only in encrypted chat rooms, their computer servers require passwords, and many are located overseas, the FBI has said. Such groups are believed responsible for stealing and distributing copyrighted works including films "Star War Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and software such as Autodesk's Autocad 2006 and Adobe's Photoshop."

Rock n' roll goddess Patti Smith mused about BlackBerrys while performing a song-by-song tour of her debut -- and amazing -- 1975 album "Horses," Andrew Perry wrote in the London Telegraph. Smith, Perry wrote, was in town as curator of this year's Meltdown at the Royal Festival Hall .

"This penultimate concert in the two-week festival was the hottest ticket, though, because Smith returned, with band, plus guests Tom Verlaine of Television and Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, to perform Horses ... in its entirety," Perry said. "That legendary, spellbinding sequence of music has gone down in history as the first spasm of punk rock, the bridge between the visionary 1960s rock of Smith's heroes Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix on the one hand and the manic energy of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols on the other." In the midst of the free-form fest, Smith launched an off-the-cuff polemic about expenditure on "BlackBerrys and business communication systems, when we can't communicate with our children." Gosh, why didn't someone text me about this when it happened?

And on an end-note, a contributor to the Slashdot technology news list noted that a member of the British Parliament told his colleagues that he is a Jedi . Yes, a Jedi.

The declaration prompted this comment from Slashdot contributor TripMaster Monkey: "To those misguided simpletons out there who insist on calling themselves 'Jedi knights', I offer you this chance to prove yourselves: Just build a lightsaber. A real one. That's all. What's that... you can't? Don't have suitable raw materials, you say? OK ... that's fair...how about this, then: Force choke me. From where you are right now. Go ahead ... it's OK."

That's why we call this time of year the silly season. U.S. readers, have a happy 4th.

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.