E-DRUG: India's choice (2)(Words and how they are used)
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The New York Times article was correct in advocating that India use Public Health provisions to see that compulsory licensing is made easier for drugs that are useful.
However it continued the practice of using phrases that obscure some vital issues.
" India has become the world's supplier of cheap AIDS drugs because it has the necessary raw materials and a thriving and sophisticated copycat drug industry made possible by laws that grant patents to the process of making medicines, rather than to the drugs. "
This implies that somehow this was not done absolutely correctly. Patent laws until the WTO agreement were National Rights. Therefore India had every right to frame laws that were suitable for it, rather than anybody else.
Consider an alternative
"India has become the world's supplier of .... made possible by laws that grant patents to the process of making medicines (which was allowed under International Law), rather than to the drugs themselves."
The phrase "copycat" also has dubious conotations. This implies that everything has been copied and is the same; only the molecule is the same and manufacturing process developed by Indian industry are very different. In fact some of the alternative processes developed have given better yields than the original process and have been adopted widely (some times even by the innovators). "Knockoffs" too has dubious connotations such as pirated CDs.
Consider an alternative
" ... thriving and sophisticated drug industry built on innovative and alternative manufacturing processes ...."
And finally the grand daddy of them all "Intellectual Property Rights" - Patents are grants, privileges given by a society to the applicant(s). They are not similar to Human Rights that an individual intrinsically has.
Consider how different it would have been if it had been "Intellectual Property Privileges" - would overiding privileges have been as difficult "Rights"?
Krisantha Weerasuriya
Regional Adviser, Essential Drugs and Medicines Policies
South East Asian office (WHO)
New Delhi
WeerasuriyaK@WHOSEA.ORG
(Comments made in personal capacity)