Letters to the Editor
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drug development costs are grossly overstated
I think you'll find that Big Pharma is the most profitable industry around and that they consistently overstate the costs of drug development to justify their outrageous prices. It's hard to go into detail without using an URL, but you may care to read the article 'The great health care grab' in New Internationalist, Issue 362, Nov 2003.
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Brazil vs. the Drug Lords
I'm continually amazed that the parameters of this discussion never extend to include the notion of governments themselves developing drugs. The concept of public health, paid for universally by taxes, for the good of all, has disappeared from public speech. On Salon!
Of course, even MediBank, the one-time precursor of the current Australian version of Medicare, used to be described as Communism by the poltical party that contiues to serve the interests of Big Pharma among other mega-corporations.
We're not in a patent war so much as a propaganda war in the service of lengthy and ruthlessly-extended periods of patent applicability, and therefore of the exclusive right to manufacture, sell, and set price. The world dies while Big Pharma argues.
The amendments to the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, passed last year, protecting that county's Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, are now under attack by Big Pharma and a swollen pharmaceutical-supporting majority in both Houses of Australian Parliament. Propaganda is all. (See Dark Victory by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Allen & Unwin, 2003, for the centrality of propaganda in public policy-makingand electioneering.)
The only ethical way to produce drugs is through public, governmental, non-profit development & distribution.
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Really?
" I think you'll find that Big Pharma is the most profitable industry around..."
I think you'll find that Big Pharma consists of public corporations whose profits are public record, easily available (they all publish investor information on-line), and, comparatively speaking, nothing special.
Socializing drug development definitely has its perks, but it's not like it's going to happen in the U.S. any time soon. Nor am I entirely convinced that a typical bloated, paranoid, and inefficient government bureaucracy is necessarily the way to go.
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the real role for government
is exploring the areas of healthcare with positive externalities and negative profits.
for example, nutrients as opposed to drugs. nutrients can't be patented, and aren't profitable, but they could be very important to lower healthcare costs.
private firms won't explore areas with negative profits aggressively. but government could.
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positive externality, positive profit :: private firm, gov subsidy
positive externality, negative profit :: gov r&d
negative externality, positive profit :: private r&d, gov tax
negative externality, negative profit :: illegal
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IP vs. Social Justice
TANSTAAFL. - Robert Heinlein
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Mr. Leonard hit the nail on the head. Drug companies are not in the business of social justice ... but at least some governments are. I have little sympathy for countries like Brazil. If they want inexpensive AIDS drugs there are two things that they can do. One is to pay development costs for the drug and be able to get the drug at cost (and if they own the patent, sell the drug and collect the royalties themselves).
The other venue is the approval of a drug for sale. FDA rules have raised the cost of drug development by upwards of a half a billion dollars without a visible payback other than a delayed availability of the drug and an increased incentive to lie about it's efficacy. So license the drug for sale in Brazil with less ho-ha than the US requires.
Brazil may have a very legitimate motivation but doesn't legitimize the literal equivalent of highway robbery.
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Godwin's Law
There ought to be an addition to Godwin's Law ("'As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.' There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.") to cover quoting Robert Heinlein.
As Bucky Fuller liked to point out, more energy pours onto the surface of the Earth from the sun in one minute than is used by humanity in an entire year. And this energy is free. We haven't worked out how to make use of more than a small percentage of it, but it's all there waiting for us.
But back on point: The United States is known for having socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Big Pharma is so heavily subsidized by the United States government -- in ways both obvious and secret -- that the idea that their patents should be inviolable and endless -- which is what Big Pharma wants -- is absurd. I wish I had the space and the eidetic memory to go through the evidence here to everyone's satisfaction.
Not that, in my experience, it matters once someone's quoted Heinlein.