Most of you have heard by now of the $500 million fine Google will pay the feds for knowingly allowing advertising of Canadian drugs on its site. Uncle Sam thinks that Canadian drugs that are not FDA approved may be dangerous. Even though millions of Canadians take them daily without consequences, we are told that some guy in Iowa or a little old lady in Pasadena might be poisoned by them. Google, by advertising Canadian pharmacies, was seen as complicit in this mass poisoning the feds like to imagine.

They imagine it, of course, because the powerful pharmaceutical lobby in the USA pays feds to imagine such things. Members of Congress who can’t even spell “pharmaceutical” are right in there working tirelessly to keep drug prices high right here at home.

So the news that Google was ordered to pay a half-billion dollars for helping Canadian pharmacies peddle allegedly dangerous, non-FDA-approved drugs focused on the fabricated dangers to our health that were avoided by this federal bust. This is hogwash and, worse, part of the great American brainwash so common here in God’s country.

In the first place, Americans who look to Canadian pharmacies for prescription relief do so not because they want to buy some hokey, untested witch doctor brew, but because they need the same Lipitor, Simvastatin or Prozac they take now but can’t afford at US prices. The drugs in Canada aren’t any different, they are just more affordable. Does the FDA really want is to believe that Lilly or Pfizer or any of the big drug houses make one pill for Americans and the same pill (with poison in it) for Canadians?

Secondly, if you buy the FDA baloney, you may be interested in knowing that that same trusted federal agency that once approved the deadly Vioxx has had to take at least 10 formerly “approved” drugs off the market in the last decade. That’s one a year, folks, so step right up and be a guinea pig for Uncle Sam.

One final local chuckle about the Google story: in Rhode Island, local reporters were so proud of the fact that one of our own police departments, from the town of North Providence where I lived for 13 years, helped break the Google case. This same town has been in the news here for about a year now: at least three of its town council leaders and a once respected town solicitor have just been shipped off to federal prison for assorted bribery and extortion charges that stuck. No wonder the crooks got away with all that for so long; the cops in town were too busy making sure some old buck didn’t buy cheap Viagra from a pharmacy in Quebec.

As my mother used to say, “What a country!”

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Photo:courtesy of wikicommons public domain