The pill in your medicine cabinet is a national security issue

A red speck on an allergy pill may have been the only thing standing between American patients and potentially deadly medication reactions.

In July, batches of cetirizine, the generic version of Zyrtec, were recalled after being contaminated with another drug during manufacturing in India. The contamination was not caught at the factory. It was not caught by FDA import screening. It was caught because a pharmacy technician happened to notice something looked wrong.

It is alarming that systems currently in place were not adequate to ensure drug purity and safety.

Before I became a member of Congress, I worked for more than 30 years as a physician, and I prescribed medications like Zyrtec countless times. Parents brought their children into my office with seasonal allergies, asthma, eczema, and other conditions, and I wrote those prescriptions without wondering whether patients could trust that the medicine inside the bottle was exactly what the label said it was.

Today, that trust is increasingly dependent on factories thousands of miles and an ocean away.

America has pushed more of its pharmaceutical supply chain overseas, leaving us heavily dependent on countries like China and India. More than 80 percent of the ingredients used to make essential medicines are produced overseas, including 90 percent of the raw materials used to produce critical drugs, like the antibiotics penicillin and amoxicillin. China dominates the production of many of those raw materials, while India uses Chinese inputs to manufacture generic medicine. There are serious questions about whether we can........

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