India
Some friends and I got together a little demonstration outside the Indian Embassy last tuesday.
We were there to ask the staff to forward our letter to their PM, which requests an assurance that he and his government will support generic drug manufacturing.
India is in the middle of trade talks with the US which jeopardize access to AIDS treatment for thousands of the infected poor. India, the leading generic manufacturer, is being asked by the US to enact stringent intellectual property laws that would end the production and sale of these lifesaving drugs at affordable rates. We're talking about drugs that can be produced and sold for 20 cents a day jumping back up to thousands of dollars per year, well outside the ability of most people in the world to pay - over 1 billion people now live on less than 1 dollar per day. The rise in cost is not due to cheap indian labor alone, but more significantly because of large premiums charged by western pharmaceutical companies to support their massive advertising budgets. From Public Citizen:
The drug industry’s top priority increasingly is advertising and marketing, more than R&D. Increases in drug industry advertising budgets have averaged almost 40 percent a year since the government relaxed rules on direct-to-consumer advertising in 1997. Moreover, the Fortune 500 drug companies dedicated 30 percent of their revenues to marketing and administration in the year 2000, and just 12 percent to R&D (emphasis mine).
PhaRMA, the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, have long been advocating the use of US trade policy to protect their clients' intellectual property over the human rights of poor people to receive treatment for AIDS and other diseases. Their successes have been startling, but not complete - after they enticed the Clinton Administration to sue South Africa to stop its use of generics, AIDS activists protesting at Al Gore events shamed the administration so thoroughly that the policy was reversed.
The embassy staff were easily the most polite of any target of a demonstration I've attended, and the most generous with their time. The representative who took our letter had even worked on treatment access issues before. This seems like a government genuinely concerned with the rights and welfare of its people; I wish we could say that of ours.
We were there to ask the staff to forward our letter to their PM, which requests an assurance that he and his government will support generic drug manufacturing.
India is in the middle of trade talks with the US which jeopardize access to AIDS treatment for thousands of the infected poor. India, the leading generic manufacturer, is being asked by the US to enact stringent intellectual property laws that would end the production and sale of these lifesaving drugs at affordable rates. We're talking about drugs that can be produced and sold for 20 cents a day jumping back up to thousands of dollars per year, well outside the ability of most people in the world to pay - over 1 billion people now live on less than 1 dollar per day. The rise in cost is not due to cheap indian labor alone, but more significantly because of large premiums charged by western pharmaceutical companies to support their massive advertising budgets. From Public Citizen:
The drug industry’s top priority increasingly is advertising and marketing, more than R&D. Increases in drug industry advertising budgets have averaged almost 40 percent a year since the government relaxed rules on direct-to-consumer advertising in 1997. Moreover, the Fortune 500 drug companies dedicated 30 percent of their revenues to marketing and administration in the year 2000, and just 12 percent to R&D (emphasis mine).
PhaRMA, the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, have long been advocating the use of US trade policy to protect their clients' intellectual property over the human rights of poor people to receive treatment for AIDS and other diseases. Their successes have been startling, but not complete - after they enticed the Clinton Administration to sue South Africa to stop its use of generics, AIDS activists protesting at Al Gore events shamed the administration so thoroughly that the policy was reversed.
The embassy staff were easily the most polite of any target of a demonstration I've attended, and the most generous with their time. The representative who took our letter had even worked on treatment access issues before. This seems like a government genuinely concerned with the rights and welfare of its people; I wish we could say that of ours.
posted by onlooker at 1:09 PM
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