Digital Commons Network^™

Reputation And Authority: The Fda And The Fight Over U.S. Prescription Drug Importation, Thomas J. Bollyky, Aaron S. Kesselheim

Vanderbilt Law Review

There is popular and bipartisan support for legalizing the importation of lower-cost medicines from Canada to help reduce the high prescription drug costs that Americans pay. Despite the wide interest in this policy, attempts over the last sixteen years to create a formal system for large-scale prescription drug importation in the United States have failed. The Trump Administration recently issued a final rule to enable the legal importation of prescription drugs from Canada, but the rule has important design flaws and seems destined to suffer a similar fate as previous efforts.

In this Article, we argue that prescription drug importation …