LAKELAND, Fla. – Behind a gate in Lakeland sits the warehouse at the center of a state program that has cost Florida taxpayers nearly $82 million.
It was built to hold cheaper prescription drugs imported from Canada. Five years later, the state’s own reports show none have arrived.
When News 6 drove to the facility and asked to see inside, the gate opened. A worker met us outside and said he couldn’t answer questions. We couldn’t see through the windows. From the News 6 drone, the shipping bays behind the building were nearly bare.
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In 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis championed a plan to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada in bulk. The drugs were meant for state programs, including Medicaid, state prisons, state hospitals and county health departments. They were never meant for consumers at the pharmacy counter.
When no company bid to run the program, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) negotiated a contract with Dallas-based LifeScience Logistics. That contract, signed Dec. 30, 2020, started at $38.8 million. Two years later, the state renewed it and added $43.5 million.
According to Florida’s contract tracking system, the state has paid LifeScience $81,946,746.74. That works out to about $1.2 million a month since 2021.
AHCA’s most recent quarterly report to lawmakers, covering April through June 2026, lists the number of drugs imported under the program as “N/A.” It says the company “has not contracted with a foreign manufacturer.”
“It’s beyond waste. It’s just burning, lighting money on fire,” said Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator who now leads the Florida Policy Project. “This was an idea that somebody cooked up that they just put tons of money towards without actually having a real pathway to complying or to get the drugs into Florida.”
Brandes said he confirmed with the legislature that lawmakers have no knowledge of any drugs entering the state under the program.
[WATCH: Florida seniors brace as border rule threatens cheaper Canadian drug imports]
In 2022, Florida sued the Food and Drug Administration, accusing the Biden administration of stalling its approval. The state argued it had to keep paying the company because Florida “must be ready to start the Program immediately once approval from the FDA is obtained.”
The FDA approved Florida’s program in 2024, the first state program in the nation to win approval. The agency has extended that approval four times since, most recently in May 2026.
The contract between the state and LifeScience included a clause addressing exactly this outcome. If the company failed to secure agreements with Canadian manufacturers or wholesalers “at prices that would yield significant savings to the State,” the contract says, “such an event will result in the dissolution of this Contract.”
Instead, in December 2022, more than a year before the FDA approved the program, the state renewed the contract for three more years. The contract has never been audited, according to the CFO’s contract database.
News 6 asked DeSantis whether the program was government waste. “No,” DeSantis said, adding that he signed the program into law in his first term. He called the premise of the question “a little weird,” saying “we’re the ones fighting big pharma.”
The governor blamed the Biden administration and the Canadian government. “Not only did we have Biden against us, the Canadian government was against us,” he said.
But it was the FDA under Biden that approved Florida’s program. And AHCA’s own report blames drug manufacturers, saying implementation “has been delayed due to significant resistance from pharmaceutical manufacturers, who ultimately control the supply chain for their products.”
DeSantis said the state isn’t giving up. “I would say stay tuned on that,” he said. “We’ve had to go through a lot of roadblocks, but we will have something about what we are doing in Polk County.”
The state’s payments to LifeScience stopped in July. AHCA extended the contract one final time, through Dec. 31, 2026, “at no cost to the Agency.” The extension notes that the state “has exercised all renewal options.”
“They threw more and more money at it every year thinking that they were gonna get a different result,” Brandes said. “Some people would call that the definition of insanity.
News 6 has reached out to AHCA and has not received a response. LifeScience Logistics did not return News 6’s call. In 2024, the company received another state contract, worth up to $116 million, to build and manage a warehouse for the Florida Division of Emergency Management’s hurricane supplies.
Watch Gov. Desantis’s full response to our question below:
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