Demonstrations against price gouging

["JOHN-HENERY RILEY" <rileyjo@cpmail-nz.cis.columbia.edu>]

  Members of ACT UP/New York, Golden Gate, Philadelphia, Paris, and
  Atlanta went to the XI International Conference on AIDS held in
  Vancouver Canada July 7-11. We issued the leaflet entitled AIDS
  Profiteers Declare War.
  
  
  AIDS Profiteers Declare War
  
  
  Encouraging news about the clinical benefit of protease inhibitors
  means nothing if people do not have access to these drugs. By pricing
  drugs as high as the market will bear without opening their books to
  give even the slightest justification to the cost, drug companies have
  declared war on people with HIV throughout the world. Their
  profiteering ensures that these drugs will at best bankrupt government
  health care programs and at worst be denied to millions of people
  worldwide.
  
  
  Hoffman-LaRoche 
  
  declared war by setting the then highest-price for an anti-HIV drug,
  even though saquanivir is under-dosed and under-absorbed in its
  current form.
  
  
  
  Abbott 
  
  declared war by demanding an even higher price for ritonavir and by
  limiting access before approval to a 1,000 lottery, claiming severely
  limited drug supply. Two months later, after FDA approval, enough drug
  to stock every pharmacy in the U.S. miraculously appeared! Such deceit
  is intolerable.
  
  
  
  Merck 
  
  declared was by dispensing indinavir through a single pharmacy that
  added such an extreme markup tot he drug's price that activist had to
  go to jail to get the price lowered! While the current price is lower
  than other protease inhibitors, it is still unacceptable without
  justification. 
  
  
  
  These companies have simply continued a long tradition of
  price-gouging begun by Galxo-Wellcome (then Burroughs-Wellcome) and
  others:
  
  
  
  Pfizer 
  
  declared war by refusing for years to offer any discounts to publicly
  funded health programs in the U.S. Pfizer drained millions of precious
  dollars from these programs, and then refuses to conduct any
  AIDS-related research.
  
  
  
  Astra 
  
  declared war by demanding the highest price for any AIDS-related drug
  in history - $35,000 a year for foscarnet, a CMV treatment - even
  thought he vast majority of the research as publicly funded. Repeated
  calls for a price reduction have been ignored.
  
  
  
  Serono 
  
  declared war by demanding $1,000 a week for human growth hormone
  before it received FDA approval for AIDS wasting. While ACT UP
  pressure has forced Serono to agree to an annual price cap, Serono
  still refuse to justify its price.
  
  
  
  BTG 
  
  declared war nu increasing the price of oxandrolone - a 30 year old
  anti-wasting treatment - over 1,200% after its usefulness in AIDS was
  shown. 
  
  
  These are just a few examples of why we must begin a relentless
  campaign against these price gougers to demand that they:
  
  
  Drop Their Prices or Open Their Books
  
  
  Drug prices must be economically appropriate to each country. To
  demand obscene profit margins off the backs of people with AIDS, or to
  make access for people in developing countries unimaginable, is
  criminal. If the drug companies are so sure that their prices are
  ethical, why have they consistently refused to alow any independent
  auditor to look at their actual costs.
  
  
  If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding?
  
  
  
  Declare War on AIDS Profiteers.
  Whose Side are You On?
  <End>
  
  Since 1987 ACT UP/NY has opposed price gouging by drug companies. We
  fought in 1994 to maintain and strengthen the Fair Pricing clause in
  the National Institutes of Health Cooperative Research and Development
  Agreements. Recently ACT UP's targeted Statlanders Pharmacy for its
  outrageous 37% markup on the price of Crixovan. Using a combination of
  tactics including Direct Action, ACT UP forced Stadtlanders mail order
  pharmacy to give a 19.5% cash discount on the retail price of
  Crixivan, a powerful new AIDS drug manufactured by Merck & Co. of Blue
  Bell, PA. Stadtlanders, based in Pittsburgh, is the sole commercial
  distributor of the drug. 
  
  ACT UP plans further demonstrations against high prices on AIDS 
  drugs.