Ah, the old Tamper With Canadian Products That May Or May Not Be Headed For The American Market And Then Hope For Deregulation trick!
Like a sprite from the pen of Bil Keane, our old pal Non Sequitur has left his comrades Not Me and Ida Know behind in order to haunt the war on terrorism. This time, it's acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford who has invoked the spirit of bin Laden to counter the threat of…Canadian drug importation. In this AP interview, Crawford says the possibility of terrorist tampering tops his list of worries about drugs coming in from Canada:
Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.
"We get our cues from chatter that occurs around the world, which is relayed to us by the intelligence community, and also from past incidents and things that happened domestically," he said.
Leave aside that this is the sort of scheme for mayhem even The Penguin would dismiss as unnecessarily convoluted (why bother with Canada, when, as Crawford himself notes, product tampering is still a frequent occurence in the Good Ol' USA?), that a DHS spokesman conspicuously fails to support the commissioner's claim in the same article, and that the other threats Crawford mentions—lack of refrigeration in shipping, sale of counterfeit products, and incorrect potencies—seem far more likely to occur than this one. What value would the FDA be adding with regard to this particular threat? I understand our neighbors to the north already have one or two regulatory agencies of their own.
In a Reason article from a while back, Todd Seavey tried to figure out the point of the FDA.