More APO Woes

From the Stars and Stripes:
"Medication from US won't be mailed to APOs in Germany"

Prescription medications addressed to military post office boxes in Germany soon will be flagged by U.S. postal clerks stateside and not sent. William Kiser, the top postal officer for U.S. forces in Europe, said that U.S. post offices would stop sending the medications and a variety of other items the German government has banned or restricted from import. The target date is Jan. 1, Kiser said. Postal clerks will match restriction codes for the items with ZIP codes. Late last year, German authorities began confiscating mailed medications, U.S. officials said, enforcing a law the Germans say has been on the books for years. U.S. authorities only learned recently, after packages were confiscated, that the mailed medications they thought were legal — covered under the status of forces agreement and viewed as domestic mail — were not. The longtime practice had been encouraged by Tricare, the military health insurer, as both less expensive and more convenient, especially as more military health centers closed along with their garrisons. The German Health Ministry said mailing medications from the U.S. to military post office boxes — or any individuals — violates the law, just as it’s illegal for residents in Germany to receive items including meat products, caviar, counterfeit trademarked items, such as fake brandname handbags, vitamins and body-building supplements. The German government declined to make an exception, saying that prescription medications from the U.S. could be sent only to military authorities, such as medical commands and their hospitals and pharmacies. As a result of the German ruling and new restrictions, military pharmacies will be beefing up their formularies to carry most drugs that beneficiaries had been getting in the mail, said Army Col. Richard Jordan, executive director of Tricare’s Eurasia-Africa office in Sembach.

^ I said this before and I'll continue to say it: this is just plain wrong. It is one thing for the Germans to say it's not allowed and another for the US Governmnet to go back to the practices where ALL military (APO) mail went on a military plane and thus avoided German Customs and then went by military trucks to the American bases. Then the German Government would never get a hold of the American mail and American soldiers and their families could get the medicines they need. Someone should tell the Germans that we saved them (well half of them) for several decades and could have just let the Soviets take the whole country. It's times like these (when I see how the Germans are treating us) that I wish we had just left the country in 1945 and the Soviets had taken it over completely. I really hope the US Military and the US Government stands up (like we have done in Germany in the past) and gets these new rules reversed. I could understand if this had always been German policy, etc but it hasn't and is now affecting the men, women and their families that protect us. ^

http://www.stripes.com/news/medication-from-us-won-t-be-mailed-to-apos-in-germany-1.189955