Drugmakers And Pharmacists Sue Maine Over Importation Law | Pharmalot

I have had investments in drug manufacturers for decades, and I truly believe that we need to do everything we can to encourage research and development of new medicine.  Simple drug or immunization breakthroughs have saved millions of lives and have saved billions, or maybe even trillions of dollars in medical care.
However there are inefficiencies and perverse, sub-optimal incentives built into our pharmaceutical industry that allows tremendous waste of effort and increases the cost unnecessarily.  When "big pharma" is unable to develop truly new drugs, they get involved in developing and marketing "me too" drugs which are just knock-offs of original drugs.  That helps promote competition, but creates a lot of extra expense in getting them approved.  The advertising and marketing cost, in some ways gets passed on to consumers as well.
I'm also critical of the restrictions on import of medicines into the US.  This is another example of big pharma trying to "game the system" so that they can raise the price they charge consumers in the US while still compete on a world market, with lower prices elsewhere.  Maine is trying to allow residents to import drugs from Canada, UK, Australia etc.  However big pharma wants to stop it.  See this article:
Drugmakers And Pharmacists Sue Maine Over Importation Law | Pharmalot:
Are we to assume that the drugs sold in those countries are "less pure" than the ones sold in the US?  Most of them are made by the exact same multinational company -and sometimes to even tighter standards.  Yes, they love to pull out some examples of situations where problems occurred.  However there have been recalls of drugs all over the world -- including many within the US.
I think the Government should not stand in the way of competition --and at some point has to allow the buyer to take responsibility for verifying the drugs they receive are OK.  Big pharma could also facilitate that with better serial number barcoding on all bottles that could be scanned to verify --not a huge technological task.  However they don't want to do that, because it would actually increase competitive pressure on their bottom line.