The American virologist Jonas Edward Salk worked hard for seven years to create a vaccine against polio. After the war, this disease was the number one danger to public health. In 1952, in the U.S. alone, there were 58,000 recorded cases, most of them children. Some 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left handicapped. The discovery of the vaccine in 1955 was a huge relief for the whole world. The gains were even greater; millions were saved from death and paralysis. Billions of dollars could have been made in profit if somebody had owned a patent on the vaccine, a vaccine that today is used on every child around the world. And yet, when Salk was asked after his discovery who would have true ownership of the new drug, he replied characteristically, “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Sixty years later, news about a different drug is shaking mankind. Turing Pharmaceuticals decided to increase the sale price of the drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent. It is a drug that is used as an anti-malarial and also for the treatment of co-infections in patients whose immune system has been weakened by AIDS. The price of the drug was increased from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet in one day. Martin Shkreli, 32, ex-manager of a for-profit investment fund, who, it is worth mentioning, has never worked on production of the drug, simply bought the patent, and stated that the price of Daraprim, which has been commercially available for 62 years, did not produce enough profit.
Exorbitant Prices
Andrew Hill, professor of pharmacology at the University of Liverpool, reported that pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. charge up to 600 times the production cost of their preparations. According to a study that he presented in Vienna, the selling price of the anti-cancer drug Tarceva, sold by the Swiss group Roche, together with a hypothetical profit of 50 percent, comes to $236 per patient per year. But this preparation, in reality, costs an American patient $79,000 per year, and a European patient $40,000 per year. The drug Glivec, made by the Swiss company Novartis for the treatment of leukemia, has a production cost of $159 per patient per year, yet it costs $106,000 dollars per patient per year in the U.S. and between $29,000 and $35,000 per patient per year in Europe.
Pharmaceutical companies justify these exorbitant prices by masking them as necessary for funding the research and development of new drugs. But, as Professor Hill stated to the French Press Agency, pharmaceutical companies spend more on promotion and marketing than research. It should be noted that when we say “marketing,” we also mean bribes in the form of money or travel for doctors to promote their preparations. The numbers are revealing: Annual profits for the biggest pharmaceutical companies come to $71 billion, with only $8 billion going toward research and $17.5 billion used to promote their products.
It is not the first time that pharmaceutical companies are in the eye of the storm for the pricing policies that they follow in matters of life and death. In 2001, 40 pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government because it looked away when the pharmaceutical company patents for AIDS drugs were infringed upon. In that country back then, 10 percent of its population (around 4 million people) were infected with the HIV virus, and life expectancy had collapsed to 27 years! The government decided against border controls to check whether the imported medicines were original, or if generic medicines were produced “illegally” in other countries; the medicines were, in essence, “pirated.” Thus, the annual cost for treatment of the disease fell from between $10,000 and $12,000 to $60 per patient per year.
The legal battle begun was a public relations nightmare for the companies, but also for the American government, which supported the companies because of the huge influence that the pharmaceutical lobby has in Washington. Two years later, the pharmaceutical companies withdrew their lawsuits. South Africa agreed to import brand name medicines, and the annual therapy cost of between $10,000 and $12,000 was reduced to $600, ten times the price of the pirated generic medicines.
Intellectual Property
It was a great victory for activists around the world who fought against the power policy that the pharmaceutical industry has around the globe, but it didn’t solve the basic problem, which is the enforced monopoly that some businesses obtain over knowledge, even in matters of life and death for millions of people. This monopoly is called “intellectual property,” about which American diplomat Harlan Cleveland observed, “Protecting intellectual property is the wrong verb about the wrong noun.”
Intellectual property is, of course, an oxymoron. It is impossible for it to exist, as the great politician and thinker Thomas Jefferson characteristically observed almost 250 years ago. “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it … That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe … seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
Yet, intellectual property is created through legislation. It is an intervention by the state, and like we used to write a while back, “it constitutes a privileged convention, like those that were given by kings to the members of their court (monopolies over essential products, e.g. salt) which a person or business can take advantage of or even trade on … The state has the power to distribute the wealth and also has the mechanisms for imposing that process. It might sound silly, but weren’t feuds equally silly in the Middle Ages, when the king would give whole regions, together with their inhabitants, to noblemen?” (The Anti-Liberal Intellectual Property, Feb. 19, 2000).
The discussion about the limits of intellectual property over drug patents and about the power of the lobbies that impose unreasonable and sometimes fatal laws for millions of people has heated up throughout the world.
But in the Gallic village called Hellas* that is opposed to everything, what dominates the discussion is still whether doctors should be writing prescriptions using the active ingredient or the brand names of drugs. And this new government, elected to power for the first time as a party other than the two major Greek political parties, in its fight against the “memorandums” or policy position agreements — oh, but of course — legislated in favor of the pharmaceutical companies, and restored the practice of writing prescriptions using brand names.
*Editor’s note: This phrase is a reference to the French comics series “Asterix.”