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WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators found that prescription drugs obtained from Canadian Web sites pose fewer risks than medications bought from online pharmacies elsewhere.
In some instances, Canadian pharmacies had stricter standards than those in the United States, according to the report by the General Accounting Office.
The report is being released in conjunction with a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee hearing today where prominent opponents of imported drugs are to testify.
Lawmakers who advocate drug imports from Canada and elsewhere are trying to force a Senate vote to legalize the practice. The Food and Drug Administration has said it cannot guarantee the safety of the foreign products.
Older Americans have flocked to Canada for prescription medications as drug prices in the United States have soared.
GAO investigators bought drugs from Internet pharmacies in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Thailand and seven other countries. All 18 Canadian sites required consumers to supply a physician-written prescription before filling orders; five of 29 U.S. pharmacies did, and no other foreign pharmacies did.
Prescriptions filled in Canada and the United States came with labels from the pharmacy and generally included patient instructions and warnings, said the report by the investigative arm of Congress.
The biggest problem investigators noted was that drugs shipped from Canada did not have FDA approval for use in the United States for reasons such as production in unapproved plants or carrying different labels.
But the medicines had a comparable chemical composition to approved pharmaceuticals, the report said.
"The samples from U.S. and Canadian pharmacies exhibited few problems otherwise," the report said.
FDA officials long have complained that it is misleading to say drug products are equivalent without subjecting them to extensive tests.
"Whether a foreign product contains the same active ingredient is no guarantee that it is identical to the FDA-approved product," the agency's acting commissioner, Lester Crawford, wrote in comments included with the report.