[Ip-health] Financial Times on Thai Compulsory Licenses - let them die so Pharma can sell to the middle class

[B.Baker@neu.edu]

In its editorial on January 31, 2007, the Financial Times made a starkly
transparent statement in support of its opposition to a heart-medicine
compulsory license issued in Thailand on January 29;

"While Thailand remains relatively poor, it and other emerging economies
such as India (also currently subject to a legal challenge to its patent
regime) also have a growing middle class that can increasingly afford to
pay for medicines and should begin to help share the cost of future drug
innovation."

Translated, the first premise of Big Pharma and its supporters in the
international press is this:

"We need monopoly protections (well-guarded patents) in order to ensure our
ability to sell to richer consumers in developing countries who can afford
our products.  We are entitled to make these sales at supra-competitive,
monopoly prices so that we can earn money to engage in future research and
development and to reward our investors for their past R&D investments."

However, there are additional, unstated premises - and consequences - to
this argument.

First:  "Although richer, middle-class patients can afford our medicines,
we acknowledge that poorer patients cannot."

Second:  "Even though poorer patients cannot afford our medicines, we must
have patent protections to prevent generic companies from producing
lower-cost medicines that might be more affordable to these consumers or to
the governments that purchase on their behalf."

Third:  "Even if governments like Thailand seek compulsory licenses for
public-sector non-commercial use, we will oppose those licenses even though
richer patients are unlikely to rely on public sector service provision."

Fourth:  "If as a consequence of our opposition to TRIPS-compliant
mechanisms for accessing affordable medicines, 95% of the people who need
the medicines will not receive it and even if we will not make one red cent
on our non-sales to them, we are justified in preventing their access to
life-saving medicines so that we can make high profit sales to the 5%."

This is the immoral logic of unbridled corporate power that infuriates
treatment activists everywhere.

Brook K. Baker
Northeastern U. School of Law, Program on Human Rights and the Global
Economy
Health GAP