"Don't Act, Just React" Leadership Style Deadly for America

George C. Landrith

As a father of seven lively children, I know a little something about preemption. It takes 24-hour vigilance to keep knives and Drano beyond the reach of the little ones and my band saw hidden from my industrious sixteen year-old. But we're no different from most. Good parents gauge risk every day and act to prevent disaster.

Inexplicably, this common sense management style has never caught on with lawmakers. American leaders, for all their noble qualities, have one dangerous flaw. Perhaps fearful of alienating one constituency or another, they often ignore the warning signs and wait for the crash, only to play Monday morning quarterback and devise prevention policies for a second such mishap.

A painful example is found in December's Asian tsunami. While a network of 26 countries maintains an extensive warning system covering the Pacific Ocean, no such official alert system protects in the Indian Ocean or Bay of Bengal where it could have saved thousands. United Nations experts estimate it took the tsunami a full hour to reach the Indonesian coast, another two hours before hitting Thailand and Sri Lanka, and nearly six hours before pummeling Africa. International policymakers with 20/20 vision will be meeting soon in Japan to discuss implementing the necessary infrastructure to prevent such a second such disaster. That would have been an even better idea some 200,000 lives ago.

Fortunately even a broken clock is right twice a day. During the inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) coordinated the largest security protection operation ever in our nation's capitol. Why? Because they've read the reports, seen the risks, and understand what's at stake. Imagine the outcry if something catastrophic had occurred and DHS took the "don't act – just react" approach.

Another such opportunity for preemption now stares state and federal governments in the eyes. They can either act preemptively to avert sure disaster, or sit back and wait for the first American obituary. It is the crucial debate happening on both sides of the Canadian border about the safety of foreign drug importation. And now that Canada is considering ending all exportation to the U.S., the dangers are even more real.

Proponents argue that the prescription for high drug prices is to allow foreign countries to place drugs in the international pipeline that ends in your medicine cabinet. But health experts cite a frightening list of unacceptable risks. Chief among them is the already explosive rise in imports from countries we simply cannot trust with the health of American patients. They include Iran, Ecuador, China, and Thailand, countries that today ship a shocking number of drugs to and through Canada.

And who vouches for the safety of these drugs? Canada says they cannot and will not. With no blessing from either our own Food and Drug Administration or the Canadian equivalent, and participating countries refusing to guarantee safety, are we to rely on the "best practices" and "good faith efforts" of countries where we wouldn't drink the water? Let's be honest, Iran might be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to fill my prescriptions there.
Make no mistake; if importation advocates successfully convince enough policymakers to create a system of unregulated importation, patients will be harmed. A lovely, silver-haired grandmother will unwittingly purchase drugs that originated in some third-world country that are either counterfeit, made unsafe through haphazard shipping, or worse manufactured specifically to do her harm. And then the most dangerous place in Washington will be the space between any television news camera and a politician. We could practically write the sound bite now: "This must never happen again!"

Americans have a grand history of solving problems. Let's solve this one before an obituary forces our hand.

###

Mr. Landrith is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. He had a successful law practice in business and litigation. In 1994 and 1996, Mr. Landrith was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's Fifth Congressional District. He served on the Albemarle County School Board. Mr. Landrith is an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law. He is recognized as an authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, federalism, global warming, and property rights.

george@ff.org