Mr. Chair, the hon. member says that the banning of bulk sales is the remedy to everything. My contention is that is only part of the remedy. That is not where it ends.
Let us look at the Internet pharmacies themselves and how they have caused shortages of product and medications in this country. They have stretched medical ethics as though they were an elastic. They have gone so far as to send flyers in the mail last year telling doctors that if they want to make some extra money for their Christmas shopping they could sign prescriptions at $10 a crack. I raised that flyer on the floor of this House. Surely the hon. member, knowledgeable as he is on issues involving medicine, cannot say that this is okay, that this is acceptable.
I want to go back to the issue of Tamiflu. I want to read something that was read into the record earlier today. This is from a media report:
Online, demand by individuals is skyrocketing.
“It's crazy,” said Mark Catroppa, a vice president with CanadaMedicineShop.com in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company has about 175,000 U.S. customers.
Last year, his company sold no more than 10 doses of Tamiflu or Relenza in any month....During the past two weeks, about 400 people a day ordered the drugs [from outside the country].
Can the member say that these individual sales do not also affect the availability of product when that kind of increase is going on, not according to what I say, but according to what the people selling the stuff are saying themselves?
How can the member say that it is only the bulk sales that are at issue and not the Internet pharmacies as an institution?