Under Sanders’s plan, Canada would simply serve as an intermediate transshipment point for unapproved drugs heading to the United States. Canadian authorities do not inspect every shipment of products headed for the U.S. marketplace to ensure that packages don’t contain adulterated, counterfeit or illegal drugs. Canada does not have the resources to undertake such comprehensive searches, and the Canadian and U.S. governments are not currently set up to facilitate such a program. Canada’s health-inspection regime is designed to ensure the safety of medications for Canadians, not for other countries.

Absent a major policy shift here in Canada, if bulk Canada-U.S. drug shipments were to become a reality, Americans could receive uncertified, uninspected, third-party drugs. Canada inspects drugs for its own citizens; Canadian authorities wouldn’t have the ability or resources to inspect medicines destined for the United States.

What’s more, there’s an opioid epidemic in the United States, and the situation isn’t much better in Canada; British Columbia recently declared a public health emergency to combat the opioid crisis. Because Canada isn’t inspecting all trans-shipped goods bound for the United States, there are dire concerns that international opioid smugglers could disguise their narcotics as prescription drug packages. The amount of fentanyl, much of it from China, reaching Canadian ports has skyrocketed recently. Canadian officials have seized fentanyl packages fraudulently labeled as containing zero grams of the deadly synthetic opioid. This is but one example of a problem that could be exacerbated by Sanders’s proposed legislation.

Aside from the fear of counterfeit products being transshipped through Canada to the United States, proponents of importation proposals have overlooked the dangers associated with criminal organizations posing as legitimate online pharmacies.