I am writing in response to Andre Cushing’s commentary, “Mainers need Congress to pass U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement,” published Sept. 28.

Cushing argues that the USMCA will expand the free-market provisions that the North American Free Trade Agreement established, but the USMCA seems much more interested in sustaining the unfair monopolies American corporations have at the expense of taxpayers and free-market competition.

Let’s take pharmaceuticals: It is no secret that we pay more for drugs here in the States than our neighbors do (just look at the cost of insulin here versus Canada). Rather than allowing generic drug prices in Canada and Mexico to freely compete with our own drug prices, potentially driving down the inflated cost of medicine many Mainers rely on daily to survive, the USMCA would impose strict regulations on our neighbors, exacerbating the problem of government-granted pharmaceutical monopolies.

We’ve already seen our fair share of these problems in Maine in the form of the opioid crisis. After all, Purdue Pharma would not have had anywhere near as much incentive to push the OxyContin that has ravaged this state if the drug had been selling for the generic prices offered in other countries.

Nathaniel Duggan

Scarborough