Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property

An anonymous reader writes "Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.'"

Comments

Re:Medical Industry

[rjshields]

2a. Why can an old guy take a drug to make his dick hard when I can't smoke a joint?

Marijuana does nothing to oppress, instead it opens peoples' minds to think in new ways. Free thinkers are dangerous, so they keep us ignorant about its medicinal qualities and spread lies that it is more harmful than it really is. Give them alcohol to rot their minds and bodies, pornography to desensitize and viagra keep their dicks hard.

People are also scared of things they don't understand. Unless you've had a toke yourself it's easy to believe the lies when you see some bum having a whitey.