The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“PRESCRIPTION DRUGS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S9255 on Sept. 26, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I wish to speak on a subject in a happy vein.
Yesterday, the President sent a letter to the Speaker and to our majority leader on the subject of prescription drugs. In that letter he said:
I urge you to send me the Senate legislation to let wholesalers and pharmacists bring affordable prescription drugs to the neighborhoods where our seniors live.
That proposal was passed by the Senate a couple of months ago as an amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Agriculture. It was sponsored by my colleague from Vermont, Senator Jeffords, and by Senator Dorgan of North Dakota on the other side of the aisle, others, and myself. It is one of two or three ways that I have determined to be appropriate to reduce the cost of prescription drugs--not just to some Americans, not just to seniors, not just to low-income seniors, but to all Americans--by ending, or at least arresting, the outrageous discrimination that is being practiced by American pharmaceutical manufacturing concerns that are benefiting from American research and development aspects, benefiting from the research paid for by the people of the United States through the National Institutes of Health, but still discriminating against American purchasers by charging them far more--sometimes more than twice as much--for prescription drugs than they do for the identical prescription drugs in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Germany, New Mexico, and elsewhere around the world.
The proposal by Senator Jeffords and others to which the President referred at least allows our pharmacies and drugstores to purchase these drugs in Canada or elsewhere when they can find identical prescription drugs at lower prices than the American manufacturers will sell them for to these American pharmacists, and to reimport them into the United States and pass those savings on to our American citizens.
I don't often find myself in agreement with President Clinton, but I do in this case. I believe he is entirely right to urge the Speaker and the majority leader to include this proposal in the appropriations bill for the Department of Agriculture or, for that matter, any other bill going through the Senate and the House of Representatives, so that we can take this major step forward to slow down, at least, this unjustified discrimination in the cost of prescription drugs to all Americans.
In this case, I join with the President in asking both the Speaker and our majority leader to use their best efforts, as I believe they are doing, to see to it that this overdue relief is in fact offered.
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