There’s a White Rose angle to the Pfizer drugs story, and of course Pfizer aren’t the only drugs company involved. They just seem to have a higher profile.
The present situation is that the Canadian government is making it a condition of sale for the drugs companies that in Canada they must charge less for their drugs than they would like to. In the USA no such rule applies, and the prices charged for their drugs are higher. So, some Canadian retailers of drugs are, as predicted, making money by selling on some of the drugs they buy at the cheap rate, back to the USA.
This has caused the drug companies to intensify their already elaborate product tracking efforts so that they can spot Canadian retailers who are doing this.
Drug companies have sophisticated means of controlling imports. Data-tracking companies keep close tabs on doctors’ prescriptions, so companies are keenly aware of actual local demand in much of the industrialized world. The companies also closely track buying trends. When drug orders at a particular pharmacy spike in the absence of a similar jump in nearby doctors’ prescriptions, executives investigate.
Drug wholesalers also help manufacturers track these trends. “Together with the manufacturers, we have worked to identify the pharmacies that have been shipping back illegally,” said Larry Kurtz, a spokesman for the McKesson Corporation, one of the largest drug wholesalers in the United States and Canada.
The general point: when an economy is working without state interference, a seller is glad to sell to anybody, so long as the seller is willing to pay the asked-for price. Once he has, great. The buyer can then do with the product anything he likes, including resell it to someone else. The seller, in other words, will have no motive to spy on buyers to see what they do with the product. But in an interfered-with market, sellers do have a motive for such tracking.
Well, correction. Sellers often do want to know what buyers do with products. It’s called market research. But if a customer wants to buy a product, but doesn’t want to cooperate in such market research, the seller usually takes the money and does the business, and lays off with the market research.
Not so, with these errant Canadian drugs retailers. They definitely don’t want to tell the drugs companies how they are using their products, if they are using them by reselling back to the USA. But the drugs companies really want to know about this. If that makes for a fight, too bad. The drugs companies still want to know. The retailers are playing dirty if they resell to the USA. The drugs companies will also want to play rather dirty, to find out, the way they never would to do mere market research. It all makes for bad vibes, and creates a drugs-companies-lead demand for further intrusive and creepy product tracking systems which normally they might shun, on the grounds that regular customers might not like such arrangements.
