Looking For Bargains, Many Americans Buy Medicines Abroad

As drug prices have spiraled upward, tens of millions of generally law-abiding Americans have committed an illegal act in response: They have bought prescriptions medicines outside the U.S. and imported them.

Take Debra Miller, of Collinston, La., who traveled to Mexico four times a year for 10 years to get diabetes and blood pressure medicine. She quit in 2011 after the border patrol caught her returning to the U.S. with a three-month supply that had cost her $40. The former truck driver drew a warning not to do it again, but she got to keep her pills.

“I didn’t know what I did wrong,” said Miller, 51, who now pays $120 a month at Wal-Mart for her five medicines while she waits to join Medicaid.

It’s no secret that some Americans regularly buy prescription drugs on the Internet or while traveling abroad. But the popularity of the approach is underscored by the results of a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in November. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Eight percent of respondents said they or someone in their household had imported a drug at some point, a figure that would translate to about 19 million adults in the U.S. based on current Census population estimates.

Even the proportion found in the poll may be low, says Andrew Zullo, a clinical pharmacist and a doctoral student at the Brown University School of Public Health who has researched the subject. “People are uncomfortable talking about the cost of their own health care, and they don’t want to admit they are struggling to pay for their own meds,” he said. Some may also be reluctant to reveal they’ve broken the law.

Still, 8 percent is far higher than in surveys conducted by government interviewers, which suggested the number was about 2 percent in 2011 — though the government survey focused only on purchases in the previous 12 months. The Kaiser poll queried a nationally representative sample of 1,202 adults.