It seems like only yesterday that the Bush administration was warning Americans to avoid purchasing prescription drugs from Canada lest they be slipped a funky pill from some less-than-respectable foreign supplier.

The administration warned that the Food and Drug Administration could not guarantee the safety of such re-imported drugs as it nixed proposals to allow individuals and municipalities to secure lower-priced drugs through the mail.

It seems now that the FDA can't even guarantee the safety of drugs made here at home.

House Energy and Commerce Committee investigators reported last week that the FDA's inadequate inspection policies could have contributed to 81 deaths from contaminated Heparin, a blood thinner they had used.

The FDA has identified Changzhou SPL, a Chinese subsidiary of Scientific Protein Laboratories, as the source of the contaminated Heparin that was supplied to Baxter International, which manufactured and distributed the finished drug. China has denied the charges that its company was responsible.

"While FDA may respond quickly to a crisis when the danger to the public health is known, committee staff found that its routinely poor performance as a regulatory agency, responsible for the safety of food, drugs, biologics and medical devices, invites catastrophe and may have contributed to the tragic use of contaminated Heparin on patients in the United States," the committee's senior investigator, David Nelson, told lawmakers.

Although the FDA now spends $11 million on foreign inspections each year, it needs $225 million to do the job right, according to Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's drug center.

Woodcock, who testified last week before a House oversight panel, defended the U.S. drug supply as "one of the world's safest" but admitted that the FDA has not kept up with dramatic changes in the way drugs are produced and used.

"The number of pharmaceutical products on the market has grown very rapidly. Thus, the risk posed by quality problems and the complexity of regulating pharmaceutical quality have grown, as well," she said.

Second, the sites of production of pharmaceuticals have changed.

Over the past 15 years, the manufacturing of the majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished products has moved off-shore, where the finished products are often the result from ingredients made at a dozen different facilities.

"As has been seen with Heparin, intermediates and products can move through a complicated web of distribution and processing.

"Contaminated Heparin from China actually ended up in a large number of different products around the world," she said.

In the face of this growth and change, resources for FDA inspection have diminished.

"The number of foreign sites making drug products for import into the United States has more than doubled since 2001, but our inspectional coverage, which was already dangerously low and was discussed with this subcommittee in 2000, has declined by 35 percent in the same time period," she said.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, blamed greedy pharmaceutical companies and a complacent administration with jeopardizing the safety of lifesaving medications.

"Pharmaceutical companies continue to move drug production overseas to take advantage of lax safety standards and lower production costs and then we allow these same companies to police themselves," she said.

The Heparin deaths, DeLauro said, make it clear that the industry cannot police itself.

"It is long past time to give the FDA equivalency standards to regulate the inspection of foreign manufacturers and the ability to levy fines against a company that imports drugs from a facility that has not been inspected by the FDA," she said

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who chairs the committee, said that he hopes Congress will approve legislation to ensure that FDA has adequate funds and resources to inspect domestic and foreign drug manufacturing plants.