"They just don't make it in that India or China or whatever like they can here" comes off as incredibly racist imo.
>At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.
>“The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,” says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China.
So no, I don't instinctively think it's "racist" to be concerned that drugs and other materials imported from previously third-world countries might not be exactly what they say they are. We're not importing them because of their quality, we're importing them because they're cheaper. It's a race to the bottom, and anyone trying to reach the bottom is likely to take shortcuts.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-11/asian-sea...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tilapia-consumption/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130308100945/http://@ers.usda.g...
I think it's inarguable that generics have offered live-saving medication to millions, if not billions, around the world, much to the disgust of the pharmaceutical companies who would prefer a captive market like they've stitched up in the US.
The idea that the FDA can test every batch of every drug imported is ridiculous, they can however implement strict controls for the production of the drug.... but not abroad.
Why? I'm pretty sure that large scale manufacturers of electronic devices test every batch of components that they receive. Why should drugs be different?
It's not as if they have to test them for effectiveness, they just have to check that they contain certain compounds and don't contain others.
Also they could put that duty on the distributor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compounding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
I wouldn’t say they are poison, but in my experience they often don’t work as well.
One of the best examples is amphetamines. Name brand Adderall and Dexedrine are significantly more potent than the generic alternatives I’ve tried. Maybe this has to do with the binders, or maybe there is less amphetamines in it, I don’t know.
As an anecdote, my dad works as a pharma regulator for the FDA and never takes generic medication. He’s told me that generics are inadequately regulated to ensure equivalency to the original.
If you knew that they were generics beforehand, and had preconceived beliefs about generics, your subjective experience of their recreational aspects is severely flawed.
If it matters, I remember discovering this because I ended up taking a lot more because I wasn’t feeling them. Only afterwards did I notice they weren’t namebrand.
Many of the patients are kids who don't really understand what the difference between generic or name brand pills even is, so its hard to attribute the difference to their beliefs. Many pediatric doctors try to start treatment with generics and then move to the name brand as an alternative to increasing dosage.
To try to understand what was going on I recapped 7 generics and 7 brand name pills so that I couldn’t identify which was which and had my wife give me one at random each day for 14 days with her keeping track of which was given when.
After 14 days I had 100% accuracy identifying the generic vs brand name. Not good.
> David Dobbs is the author of “My Mother’s Lover,” a memoir of his mother’s long-secret wartime affair.
Oh, okay, clearly well versed on pharmaceuticals.