The City of Boston, which was once a leader in the ill-advised move to import prescription drugs from Canada, will be ending the program. So says the Boston Globe.

Importing prescription drugs from other countries has always had a certain appeal. After all, it promised to save a buck or two--and stick it to "the man," the pharmaceutical company that (allegedly) succeeds largely because of federal subsidies and seeks to (gasp) make a profit even while people are in need.

I won't go into the arguments against drug importation--they're readily available on the web. (See the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for starters.)

But this article has points worth considering:

"Brand-name Canadian drugs are typically cheaper than the same products in the United States because of national price controls in Canada."

A free-market advocate could not have put it any better--though he would add that price controls eventually reduce the supply of the item subject to price controls. When the item whose supply is reduced is a prescription drug, the end result is no good.

"The decrease in interest in Canadian supplies nationally was driven in large measure by the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, which provided seniors a lower-cost alternative for domestic drugs."

A lot of fiscal conservatives blasted the Medicare prescription benefit when it was enacted. Those complaints were largely valid in that the federal government expanded the financial obligations of Medicare without doing much to reform it at the same time. (If you're going to go into hock even more, you might as well get something in return.)

But the feds got one thing right: They relied on competition among private companies to deliver the drug plans rather than fold it into Medicare itself. The result was a savings off of projected costs. When was the last time a government program did that?

"If things are grossly underenrolled, that's the market saying they're not really interested in that product," said Meredith Weenick, the city's associate director of administration and finance.

As Peter Pitts has noted, similar programs at the state and local level have been dismal failures.

If government officials insist on spending money to help people with their drug costs, they could do worse than distribute guides on how to become a smarter shopper.