Whenever I visit the United States, friends ask me to pick up things for them, usually over-the-counter (OTC) drugs that are cheaper in the States than they are in Japan. I always return with this booty as nervous as if I were carrying a brick of hash, having once been told by a colleague how customs intercepted some contact-lens solution he had shipped over and then charged him a hefty fee to have it "destroyed."

Now that a new revised pharmaceuticals law has gone into effect, I have an excuse to refuse those requests, since presumably the cost of OTC drugs will drop considerably. Any sort of retail outlet can now sell OTC drugs as long as they have a "licensed drug-sales clerk" on the premises. These outlets will be slashing prices left and right in order to undersell competitors, thus benefiting consumers who used to pay through the nose even for something as prosaic as aspirin.

Larger drug stores, like industry leader Matsumoto Kiyoshi, have already reduced OTC prices by as much as 20 percent, and the huge retailer Aeon has announced that it is coming out with its own line of OTC drugs. Interviewed on the Nihon TV wide show "Omoikkiri Don," pharmaceutical-business journalist Mitsuji Takazawa predicted OTC prices would drop as much as 50 percent.