E-drug: Concept of generic drugs (cont'd)
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Dear e-druggers,
According to my understanding there are at least 4 important issues
behind the concept of generic drugs:
A) Communication
The use of international non-proprietary names facilitates
communication among health professionals and citizens, as we all
use the same terminology for certain drugs.
B) Avoidance of manipulation
The ultimate success of marketing is to brand the drug name of a
certain company into everybody's mind. When I ask my students
about a good analgesic drug, everybody mentions Aspirin, but
nobody proposes Acetylsalicylic acid. The same phenomenon can be
observed in other areas of marketing. The brand name Hoover has
almost replaced the generic term vacuum-cleaner in the English
language.
C) Economic production of drugs
The aim of any economy should be the avoidance of waste not the
establishment of monopolies. This can be best achieved through
multiple providers which compete for the most economic way of
production. Therefore an open source policy (comparable to free
computer software) of drug molecules is urgently needed. Under
these circumstances different producers of drugs can concentrate on
what they are supposed to do, the most economic production of drugs.
D) Unrestricted research and knowledge generation
Human creativity and ingenuity should not be restricted by
commercial interests. Consequently there should be an open source
policy regarding new drug molecules. As above we can learn a lot from
the GNU project of the free software foundation
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html). I quote: "Copyleft is a
general method for making a programme free software and requiring all
modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as
well. The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the
public domain uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program
and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows
uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software.
They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a
proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified
form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the
middleman has stripped it away. In the GNU project, our aim is to give
all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If
middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but
those users would not have the freedom. So instead of putting GNU
software in the public domain, we "copyleft" it. Copyleft says that
anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must
pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft
guarantees that every user has freedom. Copyleft also provides an
incentive for other programmers to add to free software. Copyleft also
helps programmers who want to contribute improvements to free software
get permission to do that. These programmers often work for companies
or universities that would do almost anything to get more money. A
programmer may want to contribute her changes to the community, but
her employer may want to turn the changes into a proprietary software
product. When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to
distribute the improved version except as free software, the employer
usually decides to release it as free software rather than throw it
away."
For our purpose the term programmer should be replaced by the term
scientist/researcher and the above text can be applied in an analogous
way.
Best regards
Reinhard Huss, MD MPH
University of Heidelberg
Department of Tropical Hygiene and Public Health
EVAPLAN
Ringstrasse 19D
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
Fon +49(0)6221-1382314
Fax +49(0)6221-1382320
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