Slashdot Mirror
Intellectual Property And The AIDS Crisis
Karl Chang writes: "The New York Times Magazine cover story on AIDS is basically an expose on how the drug companies are trying to keep their profits at the expense of the lives of those in the third-world. Some shocking statistics are included about the spread of the epidemic and the markup on the drugs. Interestingly enough, the claim of patents being needed to finance new research is rebutted with the statistic that two-thirds of the drug companies costs are in marketing and administration; the bulk of their costs aren't in R&D. Read the story."
This isn't a case of "capitalists and the corporate republic and patents are killing millions in Africa". This is a case of Africans and African beliefs killing themselves through denial and stigmatizations.
The article is about one problem. And you're talking about another. The article is talking about the physical needs (drugs and money). You're talking about the cultural problem (awareness, education, stigma, rejection).
This is fine. But I take issue with your use of the word 'blame'. You see, by introducing this word, you're creating a third problem. Because when you blame someone, there's a subtle implication:
"Its' their own fucking fault and they deserve all they fucking get for their own fucking stupid idocy and don't come fucking pleading to us for fucking help."
Blame doesn't get you anywhere. Actually it just gets in the way. Because there's a difference between action/consequences and blame.
When I blame somebody, I'm avoiding looking at my own respons-ability. That's the ability to respond. If we start blaming companies or witch doctors, we're forgetting our ability to respond to the situation.
Otherwise, drug companies will just blame the witch doctors, while the third world governments blame capitalist greed. While actually a concerted effort by all parties will get everybody a lot further more quickly.
I'm sure cootch knows this anyway -- I'm just saying that blame is not going to help.
When I'm looking to blame, I'm looking for how, "it's nothing to do with me." But when I'm looking for how I'm responsable, I'm looking for what I can do. How can the drug companies respond. How can the governments respond. How can the village witch doctors respond. How can South African citizens respond. How can Kenyan teachers respond. How can American citizens respond. But don't blame.
We don't blame restaurants for not giving free food to the starving masses, why do you blame drug companies for not giving free medicine to the diseased masses
because restaurants don't have legally enforced monopolies on food.
If you could buy AIDS medicines for $2 at Wendy's, I doubt people would be getting upset at the drug companies. They'd be raising money to buy it from Wendy's at wholesale...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
That argument is simply bullshit. Most AIDS research is funded in whole or in part by governmental (aka OUR) money. The only reason these companies can charge that much for drugs is because governments act as their muscle.
The thrust of the article wasn't that companies shouldn't be allowed to turn a profit; it was that they shouldn't be allowed to turn an obscene profit. As people have repeatedly pointed out, drug companies are not charging high prices just to cover R&D. Most of their profits go into advertising and paying their executives.
As a good post-modernist, I try to avoid taking moral stands; neither the article nor most of the Slashdot readership has called the companies 'evil'. However, it's difficult not to find something wrong with people, governments, and companies placing a higher priority on milking profit than saving millions upon millions of lives.
In a purely free market, there wouldn't be any IP protection; it's an artificial governmental restraint. Intellectual property law is supposed to be in service of society; and I hope that most of society doesn't believe that allowing companies to charge $21000 a year for drugs that cost $700, drugs which mean the difference between a slow, painful, debilitating death, and a healthy, productive life, is in the service of society.
Don't take a moral stand; just decide whether you'd rather the continent of Africa to collapse into complete anarchy, and much of east Asia, and perhaps Latin America too (oh no! where will we get our cheap processors and jeans?).
There are many other entities at fault in this equation. India, for example, is the number one producer of generic copycat drugs, but refuses to provide free AIDS treatment to its teeming masses. The only reason that I am attacking the drug companies so vociferously is that fools like you defend them.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
Drug Companies spend their money developing these product which save lives, of course they are going to charge money for them. Of course. By the logic of the poster, the companies should be expected to give thier product away for free because, well hey, the drugs save lives? If they don't have the ability to make money on the drugs that they invent and develop themselves they will never develop any new drugs and we'll be in a lot bigger trouble in the long run. I'd rather have AIDS drugs expensive today and have a cure for that plague that's coming tomorrow, than have them free today and nothing in the future.
Think ahead people, you're living in today and it's going to destroy your future.
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RumorsDaily
You are bleading in your car after a crash. The paramedic looks in the window and asks if you have $100 before he will help you.
He has the IP in that he knows how to help you.
He has the PP in his kit.
He has a right to charge what he wants for his these things.
I think even the most strident freemarket supporter would say that to withhold medical care is wrong. Is it realy so different when the IP is a drug and the crash victom is from the third world?
The drug companies used to sell drugs to the third world countries at the cost-of-manufacture. Know why they don't anymore? Because americans were angry that they had to pay more for drugs than third world countries. The drug companies used american revinues to offset R&D and administrative costs (enabling new research into newer drugs).
Americans were unhappy about this situation; they went so far as to get congress ready to pass laws encouraging re-importation of drugs allowing americans to buy drugs at third-world prices.
This is why the prices for drugs have gone up in the third world; Even when the drug companies were trying to be charitable to the less fortunate all they got was a PITA from americans who wanted something for nothing too.
Re-writing the laws now to allow anyone to take the drug companies' intelectual property is just going to make expensive experimental research much more risky for businesses, and therefore that sort of research that might cure AIDS or cancer will be curtailed drastically. No business in their right mind is going to spend billions to research a cure only to have somebody down the street copy it a week within it's invention and sell it at cost-of-manufacture while the first drug company cannot charge enough to recoup their R&D costs.
Next usual argument against drug companies is that they return so much back to their investors in profit and thats why the price of drugs is so high. Let me dispel that one this way. For every company that spends billions and ends up with a hard-on or bald-spot pill resulting in big profits for stockholders there are ten companies who each spent billions and ended up with zilch. Of course the 'payout' has to be a good amount if the chances of getting anything back at all are so low.
Any of you arguing the merits of socialism vs. capitalism just need to look at the achevements of the west vs. the east over the 50 years of the cold war. Sure both sides sent people to space and built sizable armies, which side benefited their common-man the most? The west had microwaves, TV's, cars, houses, ready amounts of food & goods, and appliances. The east had almost no non-military innovation (that they didn't steal from the west); the people lived with constant shortages, small cramped apartments with the minimum of comforts, and poor working conditions. I think I'll choose capitalism over socialism any day.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
but do not just blame the drug companies for the extent that AIDS is attacking Africa. Blame their governments for not spending money on AIDS awareness. Blame the tribal leaders and hell, the men of the cities and tribes for not wearing a condom because they feel strongly that it makes them less of a man. And blame the communities that stigmatize the people that have AIDS and are so afraid to get treatment, let alone let anyone else know, that is causing a greater spread of the disease.
This isn't a case of "capitalists and the corporate republic and patents are killing millions in Africa". This is a case of Africans and African beliefs killing themselves through denial and stigmatizations. It's just that the drug companies aren't helping the matter all that much. But I don't see this as a huge problems since the majority of the people in Africa that have contracted the disease refuse to admit it and refuse to get treatment.
here's some links:
link 1
link 2
link 3
well, before I open my big mouth, I would like to know just how many millions of US taxpayers dollars are going into AIDS research so that some capitalist fuckwit can "own" the "intelletual property".
That is bullshit, and I wager it's not a small amount of our money. I'm sick of the government stealing my money and giving it to corporations.
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Your poor country is suffering from plague, your family is dying, and a strange organization is a far away land states that you do not have the right to cheaply produce the medication your family needs to survive, because said organization spent the money to develop this, and you cannot afford to buy it from them.
So then through capitalist ethics, you say oh well, dont buy the drugs (since you can't) watch your family and countrymen die, and capitalism remains intact so that the betterment of humanity may continue.
...or you can die on your feet, and maybe the corporation will cave in, and you just might live. That is what you learn from Brazil.
It's amazing to me how much time people are willing to spend hyping this or that supposed AIDS problem, and how little time people are willing to spend on providing quality information about AIDS. It's also amazing to me the willful blindness most people have about this disease.
The assertion that drug companies are putting their profits ahead of lives in Africa is ludicrous. Pumping out enough AIDS/HIV medications to treat all of the HIV+ people in Africa and shipping it there at cost (without regard to marketing or promotion) would not stop the spread of the disease, nor would it save a significant number of lives. In the US, with a massive medical infrastructure, it is difficult to support the claim that these medications save any lives either. The idea that things would work even this well on a continent with problems of basic distribution and very little infrastructure (not to mention armed revolution) is silly.
The implication is that there is some pill that you take that keeps AIDS at bay indefinitely, and this just isn't the case. A treatment regimen for HIV involves a mixture of pills that have to be taken multiple times a day in a very specific fashion (with food, without food, different times of day, etc.), some of which require special treatment (like refrigeration). Religiously following this regimen may leave an individual with little to no measurable virus, and may slow the destruction of that person's immune system, but it will definitely bring major lifestyle impacts including the very real risk of major side effects which can be more difficult to live with than active HIV (not to mention more deadly). Following the regimen less religiously brings the very real danger of medication resistant virus taking over.
Throwing HIV medications into Africa, under current conditions, would do little to nothing for the masses of HIV+ people there -- those who have a stable enough situation that they can preserve the medications properly are few.
When people start talking about the realities of HIV tests and that they don't reliably show infection for six to twelve months after exposure, which means that having unprotected sex with someone after a few months puts you at risk regardless of how much you trust that person, then we'll have something available which can save lives.
I completely agree. For the past few months I've been arguing vigorously against my father about socialism/communism versus capitalism. The most common argument I get is 'human nature.' Everyone uses this little phrase to explain away any behavior that they can't understand. Why would anyone not want to share? Oh, well, I don't know so it must be human nature. Why are the humans the only species to periodically engage in the mass destruction of ourselves? Hmmm, must be our nature. Can't be the socialogical factors contributing to our behavior, or the subconscious influences we've recieved from anything and everything over the years. Nope, it's just undefiable human nature. Capitalists will argue that communism has failed and turned into despotism in its first implementations because it is against human nature. However, human nature doesn't really explain anything. It makes much more sense to me that the reason people cannout immediately adapt from capitalism to communism is because capitalism has been mentally entrenched in everyone's minds so firmly, that we don't even realize when we're being selfish. From birth we are taught to be responsible for ourselves, and not to worry about other people. The glamor associated with winning and being victorious in our society is incredible strong, and to suggest that this is so merely because it is human nature seems to me ludicrous. The other argument is that communism is undemocratic. This stems from the common perception that USSR/Despotism = Communism. THIS IS NOT SO. The minimal government that would initially exist should be entirely democratic. (Here was one failure of its first implementations - they had leaders! In a true communistic society, whoever gets the bright idea to set it up would be working in the fields right along side everyone else.) As history progresses, governments tend to get more progressive and geared towards the people, not less. The trend has gone from feudalism to monarchism to capitalism to a democratic republic; it is only logical that the next step would be one to where no one person is given importance over anyone else, where *every* occupation is democratic, and where every citizen is entitled to a roof over their head and three meals a day.