grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

Does having a friend mail me an ounce of pot from California count?

(N.B. to federal authorities -- all conceivable statutes of limitation lapsed decades ago. Heh!)

Have you tried going to Tijuana?

I went once and got a few little things, but since they are things I don't purchase in the states, I don't know how the prices compared.

You know what they say, Ken: Think global, buy local. ;)

Oh, and thanks thoreau, I'll give 'em a shot.

The medications I need, by the way, it's for a gastrointestinal thing, and without insurance, they cost about $1,100 a month or so, at my dosage level. ...from Canada, it costs about $120 a month. The price difference is ridiculous.

I've heard good things about Isrameds, which is like buying meds straight from the Israeli government, I think, but one of the medications I need is sensitive to temperature, and I'm not sure they can ship it safely half way around the world. ...they don't even seem to list it.

I'd go to Mexico, smacky, but I do worry about the quality down there. If you ever go to a border town, especially TJ, you really do need to be worried about everything down there. I mean, how do you buy meds from a place where you can't drink the water? ...or anything with ice cubes? ...where smart people sometimes pay extra for beer in a bottle that still has the cap on it, 'cause otherwise they use the bottles as glasses. ...and you're not sure if you hope they washed 'em (with TJ water) or not.

How do you buy meds in a place where you're afraid to eat the food?

And then when you come back across the border, you have to look a Customs agent square in the eye, and he looks at your ID, and you might have to tell him why you're there, and he might ask you if you bought anything and then what do you do? Lie? Tell the truth?

I suppose you could buy something and ask the pharmacy to send it to you, but leaving money with somebody in TJ and expecting them to send you something in the mail, that's kinda counterintuitive too. ...and it's not like you can go to the police there if you get ripped off.

Lots of people go to the pharmacies down there, I know they do. And if I got desperate, I probably would too. It would probably be fine.

Most of the ones I've looked at, for my medication, they require you to pay for it, and then you fill out a form and send it to them with an original of the Rx, and then they send the Rx to you in the mail.

In some countries, they don't require you to have a doctor's Rx, and so, for most of them, you fill out a form or talk to a doctor they have on staff, over the phone, via a 1-800 number, and they just send it to you.

I think it's probably pretty easy to convince people with chronic conditions, by the way, that the legal framework requiring people to get a prescription from their own doctor isn't there to help patients, so much... I know it seems to me, anyway, that the problem of people not being able to get the meds they need is much bigger and worse than the problem of people taking meds they don't need.

But my doctor assures me that it's very important for people to pay him $150 every time they want to go to a pharmacist.

I mean, seriously, how can anyone keep a straight face and tell me that it's important for doctors to protect patients with chronic conditions from the medicines they need?

A bit of a strawman? Maybe. ...but I think that really is the effect here. It is on me anyway.

Okay, okay, so what they're saying is that they're protecting patients who don't have chronic conditions from taking medicine they don't need... How big of a problem is that?! ...and how effective is that solution?!

Argh!

Every day I get several e-mails telling me about foreign online pharmacies. Granted, they specialize in v!agr@ and ci@l!s, but I can forward them to you if you want.

As for why anybody should be required to pay a doctor before going to a pharmacist, don't forget that the majority of Americans these days think that one legitimate purpose of government is to protect people from themselves.