Home |  Elder Rights |  Health |  Pension Watch |  Rural Aging |  Armed Conflict |  Aging Watch at the UN  

Mission  |  Contact Us  |  Internships  |  Donate Now!  

back

Support Global Action on Aging!

The drug traffickers here at this tiny desert border crossing all fit the same profile: white, elderly , often wearing Bermuda shorts and American Legion baseball caps.

Their methods are also remarkably similar: trying to sneak as much cheap, Made-in-Mexico generic prescription pharmaceuticals as they can past a U.S. Customs Service that is coming under renewed pressure to keep foreign medicine out of the country.

"I'm buying enough for the rest of the year," says a 68-year-old woman from Eugene, Ore., who identifies herself only as Jean. Boxes of a generic version of the estrogen-replacement drug Premarin are buried in the bottom of her plastic shopping bag; a hundred tablets cost her $9 -- a fourth of the $35 copay she would have under her prescription-drug plan back home. Exchanging nervous glances with other seniors inching down a long line of pedestrians waiting to return to the U.S., Jean begs, "Please don't write anything that will get me in trouble."

Nestled in a crook of the twisting Colorado River, Los Algodones is surrounded on three sides by U.S. territory, and is Mexico's closest link to Yuma, Ariz. Its 10,000 residents swell to 25,000 during the winter months as rural folk arrive to peddle tacos and souvenirs to American retirees. Coming too are the many professionals -- doctors, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists -- who operate over 150 storefront businesses within a four-block area just beyond the border crossing. Los Algodones, which receives 1.3 million U.S. visitors each season between the months of October and April, is one of Mexico's busiest destinations, rivaling such hotspots as Cancun and Los Cabos in sheer number of tourists.

Drugs, dentures and eyeglasses are the lure and now, toward the end of the season, this busy border town is enjoying a surge in last-minute shopping. Rising desert temperatures and fears of a sharp increase in gasoline prices are causing the early exodus of "snowbirds," the 90,000 elderly residents who descend on Yuma each winter in recreational vehicles. Stocking up on pharmaceuticals is not only practical. For many elderly shoppers cutting the soaring cost of medication each year -- or making a business of selling Mexican imports to relatives and neighbors up north -- is a crucial part of budgeting for retirement.

"The savings basically pays for my trip," says Dell Sanders, 76. She and her neighbors at the RV campground save on things like asthma inhalers, and copycat versions of the drugs Celebrex, Zocor, Lipitor and Vasotec, savings that come to thousands of dollars each year. Ms. Sanders lives on less than $1,200 a month from Social Security. Having seen most of a $50,000 stock portfolio evaporate since 2000, she is blunt about her need to visit Mexico. "If we couldn't get cheap meds," she says, "I wouldn't live."

Ms. Sanders spends hundreds of dollars each winter buying drugs for other family members. She says she spent $400 this month buying drugs for her daughter's mother-in-law in Mississippi, saving more than $1,200 on the diabetes medicine Glucophage, available here for less than $3 for each bottle of 100 capsules, compared with the U.S. price of more than $54 for 100 tablets.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which recently hardened its position against anybody abetting the importation of pharmaceuticals from Canada, has long discouraged purchasing drugs in Mexico. Prescription drugs from Canada are cheaper mainly because of government price controls. In Mexico, they are cheaper because they are generics.

U.S. government leaflets distributed at Mexican border crossings warn of counterfeit medicines, untested substances and the risks of unsupervised use. But proponents say most of the generics are made by subsidiaries of U.S. or European manufacturers. Customers even say their doctors at home tell them to shop in Mexico.

Unlike more affluent retirement communities like Scottsdale, Ariz., or San Diego, Yuma attracts many seniors who struggle with the choice to buy food, pay rent or buy medicine. In addition to the many who live in Yuma's motor courts, thousands camp on public lands supervised by the federal Bureau of Land Management, paying as little as $125 a year to park their trailers on arid stretches of land without electricity, phone service or potable water. Hundreds more treat the desolate Pine Knob campground, located on the Bureau of Land Management parcel closest to Los Algodones, as a kind of base camp for short-term visits. Paying $25 for a two-week permit, seniors travel to Mexico to be fitted for eyeglasses and false teeth, and to stock up on a year's supply of medicines.

Americans returning to the U.S. with medicine bought in Mexico are supposed to have a copy of a U.S. doctor's prescription for their drugs, and to have no more than a three-months' supply at any one time.

"Once in a while Customs will want to see a prescription, but if you don't have one, the pharmacies have doctors who'll write one," explains Jerry Clayburn, 78, a retired schoolteacher from Loon Lake, Wash. Multiple visits to Los Algodones allow retirees to skirt the personal-use restrictions by buying up-to-the-limit quantities each time. The 9,000 border crossings each day from Yuma suggest the average snowbird makes about a dozen trips to Mexico each season, or about twice a month.

Customs officials say abuses are few. "We are enforcing FDA laws," says Vincent Bond, a Customs spokesman. "A forbidden item, such as an anabolic steroid, would be confiscated; legal items are supposed to be for personal use, if someone tries to bring in a commercial amount they aren't going to be allowed to bring it in. A year's supply of heart medicine would be considered a commercial quantity."

U.S. Customs officials concede that seizures of pharmaceuticals are rare -- they averaged just three a week last year -- and arrests of seniors unheard of. Most crossers caught with too many drugs are allowed to return to Mexico and refund their purchases. A few crossers, unwilling to endure another long wait in the pedestrian line, opt to forfeit their medicine.

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com

Copyright © 2002 Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us