Drugs - The Not-So-Fun Kind

Another thing that must go: The pharmaceutical industry.

I, for one, feel their death grip on a personal level. I take five different prescription drugs every day. The total cost of my monthly doses: over $230. One of my pills alone costs over $100 per month. The pharmaceutical industry claims that high and creasing drug prices are needed to sustain research and development. But a July 2001 report by the consumer health organization Families USA documents that drug companies are spending more than twice as much on marketing, advertising, and administration than they do on research and development; that drug companies provide lavish compensation packages for their top executives; and that drug company profits, which are higher than all other industries, exceed research and development expenditures.

Let me reiterate: Drug company profits are higher than all other industries.

So in essence, the drug companies are capitalizing off of my illness, making money from my misfortunes.

Another way in which they do this is by patents. My $100 pill is so expensive because it is patented; it is the only one of its kind and there is no generic. The length of time a patent may be held has been upheld by TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, an international trade deal) due to the pressure put on lawmakers by industry lobbyists. The current length of a drug patent: 20 years. That’s nearly my entire life span. And assuming my $100 pill is in its first few years on the market, I will pay over $21,600 for this drug until a generic is formulated. But that doesn’t’ mean that a generic drug is by any means cheap. According to a New York Times 2002 article, prices of generic drugs are rising. So my only hope is to be able to have a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Compounding the problem is the demographics of consumers. The majority of patients taking medication daily are the elderly, the mentally ill, and persons with AIDS, most of which live in poverty stricken Africa. Most elderly patients are on Medicare and have fixed incomes, and many mentally ill individuals are not able to hold jobs due to their illnesses and cannot afford the care they need. This is why many homeless are mentally ill. In Africa, the AIDS epidemic continues to spread and kill millions of people because the pharmaceutical industry has fought a legal battle to keep selling high-cost, unaffordable versions of drugs (to see this in action, watch the movie “The Constant Gardener”).

And I have no conclusion for this little op-ed piece of mine. There is no end in sight. The one good thing Bush did for me was to ask Congress to look into the length of patents, and our government is in the midst of deciding lobby reforms (something they’re on the verge of bungling, but they’re taking action nonetheless). So until things actually change in our country and around the world, the masses will continue to suffer at the expense of an industry’s profit margin.