"........But the multinational pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat and wouldn't let me go. Big Pharma, as it is known, offered everything: the hopes and dreams we have of it; its vast, partly realized potential for good; and its pitch-dark underside, sustained by huge wealth, pathological secrecy, corruption and greed.
I learned, for instance, of how Big Pharma in the United States had persuaded the State Department to threaten poor countries' governments with trade sanctions in order to prevent them from making their own cheap forms of the patented lifesaving drugs that could ease the agony of 35 million men, women and children in the Third World who are HIV-positive, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In pharma jargon, these patent-free copycat drugs are called generic. Big Pharma likes to trash them, insisting they are unsafe and carelessly administered. Practice shows that they are neither. They simply save the same lives that Big Pharma could save, but at a fraction of the cost.
Big Pharma did not invent these lifesaving drugs that they have patented and arbitrarily overpriced, incidentally. Anti-retrovirals were for the most part discovered by publicly funded US research projects into other diseases, and only later entrusted to pharmaceutical companies for marketing and exploitation. Once the pharmas had the patent, they charged whatever they thought an AIDS-desperate Western market would stand: $12,000 to $15,000 a year for compounds that cost a few hundred to run up. Thus a price tag was attached, and the Western world, by and large, fell for it. Nobody said it was a massive confidence trick. Nobody remarked that, while Africa has 80 percent of the world's AIDS patients, it comprises 1 percent of Big Pharma's market.
Do I hear you offering the drug companies' time-worn excuse that they need to make huge profits on one drug in order to finance the research and development of others? Then kindly tell me, please, how come they spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development?
I was also told about the dumping of inappropriate or out-of- date medicines by means of "charitable donations" in order to get rid of unsalable stock, avoid destruction costs and earn a tax break. And about the deliberate widening of a drug's specifications in order to broaden its sales base in the Third World. Thus, for instance, a drug that in Western Europe or the States would be licensed only for extreme cancer pain might be sold in Nairobi as a simple headache cure-and at several times the cost of buying it in Paris or New York. And in all probability no contraindications would be provided.
And then of course there is the patent game itself. One compound can carry a dozen or more patents. You patent the manufacturing process. You patent the delivery system, pills, medicine or serum. You patent the dosage, now daily, now weekly, now twice weekly. You patent, if you can, every footling event in the drug's life from research lab to patient. And for every day that you fend off the generic manufacturer, you earn yourself another fortune, because markup, for as long as you own the patent, is astronomic.
But Big Pharma is also engaged in the deliberate seduction of the ............."
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/InPlace_Nations.html
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