Don Nickles: “I will be happy to, but I tell my colleagues I hope and pray the Cochran amendment will pass. If it does not pass, I…”

“I will be happy to, but I tell my colleagues I hope and pray the Cochran amendment will pass. If it does not pass, I will have an amendment that says the drugs that are covered should be of American or Canadian origin, manufacture, or control. American drugs are controlled. Even the drugs that we import, if they have FDA approval, we send FDA inspectors over to those plants to certify them. We have what is called a pedigree requirement to follow those drugs, to know where they are manufactured, know where they are distributed, before FDA puts their approval on them. So we try to and do protect safety. We do not have that for all drugs that would be coming from Canada. I would just mention there is a fatal flaw, in my opinion, in the Dorgan amendment we just adopted. One of those is that there has to be a pattern. If you look at the language of the amendment we just adopted, there has to be a pattern of importation from each importer. That is too late when there are people who have already died, are already sick, when there are people who did not get cured because we waited for a pattern, we waited for evidence, we waited for unfortunate results--not to mention, there is no telling how many people would have been cheated out of money, and so on. So I think the amendment we just adopted is probably not worth the paper it was written on.”