November 28, 2001	Wednesday	Ramazan 12, 1422

NEW DELHI: Last week’s decision by the competition commission of the EU to slap a fine amounting to three-quarters of a billion dollars upon a slew of major pharmaceutical companies for rigging the prices of vitamins constitutes a social and legal landmark. The multinational corporations were found guilty on Nov 21 of forming a cartel. This, the EU body said, milked consumers by systematically raising prices of vitamins used in products ranging from special dietary supplements to breakfast cereals and multivitamin pills. The fine is the heaviest penalty ever to have been imposed by the EU on any corporate business.

In the past too, large multinational corporations, or “Big Pharma” companies, overcharged a number of European state agencies responsible for drug procurement for public healthcare systems. Many have become notorious for rapacious practices such as ”transfer pricing”, which violate free or fair trade principles, and allow corporations to rig high returns on sales manipulated through their own subsidiaries on the basis of paper transactions and artificial prices.

No less rapacious and unethical have been Big Pharma’s gains from monopolistic patents, with which they profiteer from illness and death, not only in the rich countries of the global North, but especially in the global South, where billions lack secure access to essential medicines. Nothing highlights this rapacity more starkly than the outbreak of anthrax in the US in the wake of the Sept 11 terrorist carnage, which raised the question of procuring the recommended drug, Ciprofloxacin, at a reasonable price.

Bayer sells the same pill in India for 13 cents. Even more dramatically, India-owned companies retail the identical product for as little as six cents, or one-eightieth of the price in the US market. The “trick” lies in the fact that India does not allow strict product patenting in pharmaceuticals. It only allows process patenting: if you make the same product by another, more efficient, cheaper process, you can reap profits. This is the good news—a policy that has enabled India to build an internationally competitive drug industry, while keeping medicine prices low.

The bad news is that the World Trade Organization treaty will oblige countries like India to switch by 2005 to strict and monopolistic product patents, and thus raise drug prices to extremely high levels, making them unaffordable. Nobody would accept that the poor should die from HIV/AIDS simply because the available anti-retroviral treatment is made too expensive by Big Pharma patents.

This dramatically highlights the contradiction between patents and patients, between Big Pharma interests and people’s needs. Big Pharma’s unethical practices are equally stark. They have impelled the world’s 11 top professional medical journals to formulate a new policy in respect of publishing Big Pharma-sponsored medical research so as to avoid airing exaggerated claims or shoddy results.—Dawn/InterPress Service.