About this site
Personal Import Facts explains how U.S. federal law and federal agencies actually treat the personal importation of prescription medication — in plain language, drawn from primary federal sources. This page explains what the site is, why it exists, and the rules it holds itself to.
What this site is
This is an independent reference resource. Its purpose is to make the primary federal record on personal drug importation — statutes, regulations, agency guidance, oversight reports, court records — readable for people who are not lawyers. The federal record on this subject is real, detailed, and publicly available, but it is scattered across agencies and written for specialists. This site collects it, explains it, and links back to the originals so a reader can check the source.
Why it exists
People facing the cost or availability of a medication often encounter a confusing mix of marketing claims, forum lore, and outdated summaries. The federal framework is more knowable than that noise suggests — but only if someone reads the primary sources carefully and explains them honestly, including the parts that are unwelcome. This site exists to close that gap: to state what the record establishes, what it does not, and where genuine uncertainty remains.
What this site does not do
To be clear about the boundaries:
- It does not provide legal advice or medical advice.
- It does not recommend, rank, endorse, or validate any pharmacy, importer, source, or supply channel, foreign or domestic.
- It does not advise anyone how to obtain, possess, import, distribute, or transfer prescription drugs, and it identifies no source as safe.
- It does not facilitate any transaction and earns no revenue tied to importation.
- It has no affiliation with any pharmaceutical manufacturer, wholesaler, pharmacy, or importer.
- It does not collect reader data for marketing.
How the federal-source discipline works
The site holds itself to a primary-federal-source rule: factual claims rest on U.S. federal statutes, regulations, agency guidance, oversight reports, or court records, indexed on the References and Sources page so any claim can be traced to its origin. There are two deliberate, disclosed exceptions where a federal source does not exist for a necessary point: the World Health Organization’s global prevalence estimate on the counterfeit-risk page, and state statutes on the state-law page. Both are labeled as non-federal where they appear. This discipline is itself an editorial choice — it is not an industry standard — chosen because it keeps the site anchored to what the government has actually said rather than to interpretation.
A note on the language we use
Throughout the site, personal importation is described as tolerated under enforcement discretion — never as “legal.” That is a deliberate accuracy choice, explained in full on the enforcement-discretion page. The distinction matters: a practice that agencies have chosen not to prioritize for enforcement is not the same as a practice the law authorizes, and conflating the two would mislead the reader about real risk.
Who publishes this, and how it is reviewed
The site is produced by an independent editorial group, the Personal Import Facts Editorial Board, and is self-funded. It has no commercial interest in whether any reader imports medication or not. Content is reviewed against the primary sources, and the site is reviewed on a quarterly cycle, with out-of-cycle updates when the federal record changes materially. The reviewing-attorney attribution that appears in the site footer reflects legal and regulatory review.
Contact and corrections
Accuracy is the whole point of the site, so corrections are welcome. If you find a factual error or a broken or outdated link, write to contact@personalimportfacts.org. Requests will be evaluated against the primary federal record. Where the site reports matters that are part of the public federal record — such as published enforcement actions — it reports them as published; factual misstatements about them are correctable through the same process.
This page describes the site itself and is not legal advice or medical advice. The full disclaimers appear on the Disclaimer page.