WASHINGTON – The cost of prescription drugs in the United States is too high, but problems, including safety regulations and patent laws, must be ironed out before drugs can be imported from other countries, according to testimony heard by a Senate panel Wednesday.

The hearing was the first of several the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold to investigate the feasibility of importing U.S.-made drugs from other countries. The discussion is coming after a task force researched and identified several challenges facing importation.

Many senior citizens and other prescription drug users now organize trips to Canada to pick up drugs or order them from online pharmacies in that country, where the medications are available at a fraction of their price in the United States.

Maine’s Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are co-sponsoring a bill introduced last week by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D, to allow importation of drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

But Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who led the task force, warned that though his group found Canadian drug regulations to be equal to those of the United States, many of the online pharmacies that consumers purchase from are shams. The pills could be too strong or too weak or have been improperly stored or transported, affecting their “pedigree,” Carmona said.

“The bottom line is that the public can get something that we have no idea if it’s safe or effective,” he said.

Part of the problem with ensuring the safety of reimported drugs is that there are thousands of points of entry around the country through which packages travel each day, Carmona said. The task force recommends a “well-defined, closed system,” with the FDA having authority to monitor all of the packages that come into the country, no matter the original source, he said.

Because counterfeiters can duplicate drug labels, seals, watermarks and the shape of pills, the United States needs to develop an electronic system to track and trace packages containing prescription drugs, Carmona said. Such a system would be costly because it would need to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters and would work only if the country exporting the drugs was willing to participate, which few countries are because of the cost, Carmona said.