Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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i support what the thai government is doing and would hope that more governments follow their lead. this from the article linked via the op:
Quote:
Supporters of the compulsory licences, like Paul Cawthorne from Medicins Sans Frontiers, believe Thailand's bold step is the right one.
He argues that the big pharmaceutical companies make plenty of money from less essential drugs, like Viagra, and that they spend a lot more on advertising their products than they do on research and development.
Much of the research in the US is, in any case, done by government-funded universities, he says.
He is calling for a radical shake-up in the pricing of a whole range of essential drugs, to make them affordable in every country - and he believes Thailand has set an example other governments should follow.
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from this a few points
1) i dont think that the current state of ip law is desirable: it should not be the case that corporate patent claims for drugs are understood as not different in kind from patent claims on an innovative new napkin ring.
not all types of "property" are equivalent simply because they are "property"...
2) i am unclear about the rationale behind emphasizing the production of new drugs if many many many many many people around the world cannot afford access to existing drugs. this is not to say that i oppose the development of new drugs--but rather focus on new drug development tends to occlude the very real problems of pricing when it comes to existing drugs--and from that follows an ethical problem that pharmaceutical corporations cannot get around, to my mind--it is unethical that people who are in need of existing drugs cannot get them simply because of their cost. this is a variant of point 1.
3) more generally: the "problems" riaised here are addressed neatly in this article in the ny review of books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244
an excerpt:
Quote:
In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.
But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies?dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,
If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?[4]
Third, the industry is hardly a model of American free enterprise. To be sure, it is free to decide which drugs to develop (me-too drugs instead of innovative ones, for instance), and it is free to price them as high as the traffic will bear, but it is utterly dependent on government-granted monopolies?in the form of patents and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)?approved exclusive marketing rights. If it is not particularly innovative in discovering new drugs, it is highly innovative? and aggressive?in dreaming up ways to extend its monopoly rights.
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this raises a number of questions...among them is a dismantling of mr. jazz's claim above concerning big pharma as an example of market capitalism--it isnt--they operate with extensive direct and indirect state funding. so the premise seems to me to be wrong.
the article is interesting, though. have a look and maybe it will widen the conversation.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
Last edited by roachboy; 04-27-2007 at 09:46 AM..
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