E-drug: Washington Post editorial: Patent Wrongs
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http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/A49618-2001Feb24.html
Patent Wrongs
Sunday, February 25, 2001; Page B06
THE CHARGE that globalization puts profits before people is almost entirely
nonsense: The rules set up to facilitate the global movement of
capital and goods offer the best hope of a job and an escape from
poverty for millions of people. But one new pillar of the
international system -- the intellectual property regime overseen by
the World Trade Organization -- does
potentially favor companies at the expense of the neediest. On
Wednesday the Bush administration signaled it understands this
danger. It needs to come out and say so much more forcefully.
The potential for abuse comes in the area of drug patents. These always
involve a trade-off: The patents create a useful incentive for firms
to come up with new drugs, but they also restrict the spread of
existing drugs to people who need them. Rich countries grant
pharmaceutical firms 20-year patents, reckoning that most of their
citizens will be able to afford the drugs they need even if long
patents mean high prices. For poor countries, however, the logical
trade-off is different. Their citizens are dying for want of drugs
that exist but are unaffordable. Creating generous incentives for the
invention of new and equally unaffordable drugs is not exactly a
priority.
In 1995 the industrialized countries nonetheless persuaded the developing
world to sign on to an intellectual property deal that entrenches
20-year patents everywhere; it will be phased in by 2006.
Fortunately, they conceded a loophole: If a country faces a national
emergency, it has great leeway to license a drug from a patent holder
and make cheap generic copies. Given that the developing world is in
a state of permanent medical emergency -- because of AIDS, malaria
and tuberculosis, to name just
three killers -- this loophole ought to allow extensive manufacture of
generics. But the pharmaceutical industry takes a different view. In
a case that gets underway next month, it is suing the South African
government for its policy of copying AIDS drugs.
Until the end of 1999, the Clinton administration sided with the industry in
its maximalist view of intellectual property rights. Then it changed
sides, realizing presumably that forcing rich countries' conception
of patents undiluted on the poor world is as crazy as telling African
firms to pay the U.S. minimum wage. Now the new team at the office of
the U.S. trade representative has let it be known -- in an
off-the-record, coy kind of way -- that it means to stick to the
second and wiser Clinton policy. If this really is the intention,
Robert Zoellick, the head of the office, ought to say so clearly.
Until he does, there is reason to be worried. The pharmaceutical
lobby gives millions in campaign donations; it is constantly pushing
the U.S. trade office to file cases against developing countries at
the World Trade Organization. The administration needs to take the
opposite course: It should lead an international effort to clarify
poor countries' right to fight emergencies with generic drugs, and it
should declare its sympathy for the South African government in the
pending case. The fragile support for
globalization depends on showing that profits are not actually being
promoted at the expense of people. That means corporate lobbies
cannot be allowed to dictate health policy to the developing world,
where 30,000 people die each day from treatable and preventable
infectious diseases.
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