E-DRUG: The Drug Lords Defeated
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The Drug Lords Defeated
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Sometimes, the multinationals lose.
Last week, the United States government announced that it will stop
bullying South Africa to abandon efforts to make essential medicines
available to its population.
Chalk up a win for public health -- thousands of lives may be saved as a
result of the new U.S. policy -- and a loss for the pharmaceutical
industry. The industry had relied on the U.S. Trade Representative to act
as its proxy in pressuring South Africa to abandon policies that the drug
companies believe to be contrary to their interests.
As is almost always the case, this defeat of corporate interests is
primarily attributable to one thing: citizen pressure.
In this instance, the reversal of U.S. policy came as a direct result of a
courageous and strategically savvy campaign conducted by AIDS activists.
They forced the issue on to the national political scene and into the
national media in June, when they interrupted Al Gore's announcement that
he was running for president.
Chanting "Gore's Greed Kills" and "AIDS drugs for Africa," the protesters
dogged Gore at various other public events for a three-month period.
Two million people die annually from AIDS-related causes, the overwhelming
majority in the Third World, and the number is skyrocketing. Drug
treatments that enable many people with AIDS in industrialized countries
to survive are priced out of reach of all but a tiny number of
HIV-positive people in the Third World. When South Africa and other Third
World countries have sought to take measures to reduce the price of AIDS
and other essential medicines, the U.S. government has threatened trade
and other sanctions to block them.
Apparently none of this was newsworthy for the major U.S. media.
But the media did find that disruptions of Gore's speeches merited
coverage, and so the vice president's staff quickly moved to make the
protests stop.
The protesters targeted Gore because he has co-chaired (along with current
South African President Thabo Mbeki) the U.S.-South Africa binational
commission, the vehicle through which the U.S. government applied its
pressure on South Africa. They also picked Gore because they recognized
that he was vulnerable to negative publicity.
The result of the activist campaign was an announcement by the U.S. Trade
Representative and the South African government that the U.S. government
would cease pressuring South Africa on the issues of compulsory licensing
and parallel imports. Compulsory licensing enables a government to
authorize generic production of a product while it is still on patent,
with royalties paid to the patent holder. Parallel imports involves
imports of drugs retailed in one country for resale in another, so that
the parallel importing country can benefit from lower prices elsewhere in
the world.
Through its Medicines Act, South Africa has sought to make use of these
two tools. With as many as one in six South African adults HIV positive,
AIDS drugs are a top candidate for compulsory licensing and parallel
imports.
Since compulsory licensing can drop the price of drugs by 75 percent or
more, if South Africa is able to proceed with its plans (it still must
resolve a domestic lawsuit challenging the law which was filed by 41
multinational pharmaceutical companies), many people are likely to gain
access to life-saving medicines who would otherwise go without.
There apparently was no written agreement between the United States and
South Africa, or if there was the two governments are refusing to release
it, but it appears to represent a total U.S. capitulation. South Africa
appears to have made no concessions, promising only to adhere to its
obligations under the World Trade Organization (which permits compulsory
licensing and parallel imports) -- a commitment it had already made
repeatedly.
As important as it is, this access-to-medicines victory is only partial,
even leaving aside broader questions about maintaining adequate health
care systems in developing countries, say, or finding a cure for AIDS.
The U.S. agreement applies only to South Africa. It still remains for the
U.S. government to declare that other nations can employ compulsory
licensing and parallel imports without fear of repercussion.
And there remains the matter of whether the U.S. government will license
the patent rights it holds to essential medicines to the World Health
Organization, which could then disseminate low-priced versions of the
medicines worldwide.
AIDS activists plan to raise these issues at demonstrations in Washington,
D.C. on October 6.
But for now, they are entitled to take a couple days and savor a
tremendous victory over the powerful pharmaceutical industry.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor and co-director of Essential Action, a corporate
accountability group. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt
for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org)
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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