Remora

In 1812, as the wave of repression passed over England, now in its tenth year of war with France -- first with the revolution, then with Napoleon -- one Daniel Isaac Eaton published Tom Paine's notorious atheistical tract, Age of Reason, and was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, plus imprisonment, by his judge, Lord Ellenborough. Shelley responded to the Ellenborough in an open letter that began like this:

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I have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man.�This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton�s unmerited suffering, can have subsided.
Letter
My Lord,
As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the more awful is your responsibility, so much the more does it become you to watch lest you inadvertently punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.

You preside over a court which is instituted for the suppression of crime, and to whose authority the people submit on no other conditions than that its decrees should be conformable to justice.

If it should be demonstrated that a judge had condemned an innocent man, the bare existence of laws in conformity to which the accused is punished, would but little extenuate his offence. The inquisitor when he burns an obstinate heretic may set up a similar plea, yet few are sufficiently blinded by intolerance to acknowledge its validity. It will less avail such a judge to assert the policy of punishing one who has committed no crime. Policy and morality ought to be deemed synonymous in a court of justice, and he whose conduct has been regulated by the latter principle, is not justly amenable to any penal law for a supposed violation of the former. It is true, my Lord, laws exist which suffice to screen you from the animadversions of any constituted power, in consequence of the unmerited sentence which you have passed upon Mr. Eaton; but there are no laws which screen you from the reproof of a nation�s disgust, none which ward off the just judgment of posterity, if that posterity will deign to recollect you."

Well, we doubt posterity will deign to recollect the name of the present head of the Patent Office, James Rogin (whose debt to those great lovers of free expression, Sony, Disney and co., preceded him into office) or his successor, Bruce Lehman (on whom LI is in a once in a lifetime agreement with, of all people, Phyllis Schlafly ) or the members of Congress, who have for the last twenty years been hotwiring intellectual property laws to create just the kind of monstrosity that was envisioned by opponents of the Constitution, and exorcised, in defense of the Constitution, by Jefferson, Madison, and the signers of the Constitution. Still, we recalled this exemplary case of the suppression of opinion when we read the NYT article about the speciousness of Big Pharma's claims to be churning out innovative products under the extended protection of patent law granted them by an always supine, intellectually vacant legislature, and seconded by a patent office that has taken it upon itself to extend monopolistic protection to the biggest and dullest corporations in the land. In both cases, it is a question of competition -- in one, the suppression of those enlightened expressions that could compete with the dull dead scriptures of the governing classes; in another, it is the suppression of that competition, from rival drug companies, that would lead to much lower pharmaceutical prices and, in all probability, invention and the flowering of science. Or something like that.

So, on to the NYT article. In a study done by Blue Cross of drug "innovations" during the last twenty years, it was found that, suprise -- the innovations were mainly in labeling. Yes, labeling R & D is vital in the frontline against disease..

"New Medicines Seldom Contain Anything New, Study Finds

By MELODY PETERSEN

Two-thirds of the drugs approved from 1989 to 2000 were modified versions of existing drugs or even identical to those already on the market, rather than truly new medicines, according to a new study.
"The report also said that most of the increased spending on new prescription drugs was on products that the Food and Drug Administration had determined did not provide significant benefits over those already on the market."

But how about those remarkable drug breakthroughs, the gentle reader is asking? How about the technological breakthroughs that brought us Clarinex and Sarafem? Sorry, gentle reader:

"Clarinex, an allergy drug, is a reformulation of Claritin. Sarafem, for premenstrual irritability, is the same drug as Prozac but has been renamed and repackaged in capsules of pink and lavender."

Of course, Big Pharma has a response to these outrageous allegations:

"The drug industry's trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, criticized the study yesterday, saying that it was "flawed and misguided."

"Richard I. Smith, vice president for policy and research at the group, said that even if a medicine was similar to one already on the market, it could still offer many benefits to patients. For example, he said, even though there are several similar drugs that fight depression � including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft � many patients may not respond to one medicine but will to another."

There you go -- isn't that reason enough to protect the monopolistic hold of big pharma on all those drugs out there that they have spent their life blood, bet the farm, and sold their children in order to develop?

We mentioned Clinton's head of the Patent and Trademark commission, Bruce Lehman. Interestingly, he has followed the Clintonoid logic of selling what soul he might have had in 1968 for one brief second listening to Purple Haze in whatever vile Ivy League dorm he was rooming in to whatever vile industry would have it, founding a non-profit shill for Hollywood and the drug lords, the International Intellectual Property Institute. Here he is in heart rending testimony before Congress pleading with those bad boys to extend to Pfizer, to Merck, to all those suffering little piggies, the same, well, the same protection the computer companies (due to Lehman's stint at the Patent Office) enjoy:


"As I understand these issues, the task currently facing Congress is to find a way to regularize the process of enacting patent-specific term restoration legislation. Central to this task is to develop a system that is fair to the public and patent holders. Certainly, to shorten arbitrarily effective patent term for one of the industries whose innovations have the greatest public benefits � the pharmaceutical industry � is unfair, and discourages investment in those industries. A brief comparison of the ability of American innovation-based companies to attract funding in U.S. capital markets will underscore my point. At the present time, innovators in the computer components and software industries receive full twenty (20) year patent protection for inventions which require far less capital and involve far less risk than is the case in pharmaceutical innovation. Since most patents issue after about two years� examining time, these innovators are receiving 18 years of effective patent exclusivity. Is it no wonder that companies producing very important, but far from life saving or disease-curing products, attract market value and investment capital on a scale an order of magnitude beyond that of pharmaceutical and biotech companies? "

Ah, Bruce, this is more tear jerking than Imitation of Life! Douglas Sirk never knew, never KNEW, the sorrows of the successful pharma co -- always anxious as a debutante, wanting the best, the best for us -- wanting to cure our pattern baldness, our erectile dysfunction (and not, say, our malaria, sorry - the average malaria victim is, after all, a little dusky, as they like to say). But somehow, as we finished Bruce's testimony in a most lachrymose state, we went on to read this little disquisition, by Public Citizen, on the financial compensations accorded to the Mercks and the Pfizers, and our tears miraculously dried:


"In a year that saw a drop in employment rates, a plunge in the stock market and symbols of America s economy literally come crashing down, the pharmaceutical industry continued its reign as the most profitable industry in the annual Fortune 500 list.

While the overall profits of Fortune 500 companies declined by 53 percent the second deepest dive in profits the Fortune 500 has taken in its 47 years the top 10 U.S. drug makers increased profits by 33 percent.Collectively, the 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 topped all three of the magazine s measures of profitability in 2001, according to Fortune magazine s annual analysis of America s largest companies."

The Public Citizen article also picks apart the rather rotten premises of a Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development study that was issued, to much fanfare, in November 2001. The study put the "average R&D cost for each new drug brought to market at $802 million." Amazing, horrendous, and no wonder the poor pharma companies are trying to make money corrupting congress with hollow intellectual shills and relabeling products, you say. But in PC's estimation, there are a few things wrong with the Tufts study.

One thing is that the study excluded, right off, any R & D that was partly funded by the government. So what we are talking about here is what Libby used to do in 1968. But sure, some pharma cos. do bypass government financing. PC also discovered that the numbers in the Tufts study are, uh, sorta theoretical. In a deliciously comic passage, done completely deadpan, PC goes after the author of the study, one Joseph A. DiMasi:

"The second major flaw of the Tufts Center study is that it exaggerates the actual R&D expenditures for its sample of drugs. Specifically, the new Tufts Center estimate of $802 million includes significant expenses that are tax deductible and theoretical costs that drug companies don t actually incur. For example, roughly half of DiMasi s estimate ($399 million) is the "opportunity cost of capital" a theoretical calculation of what R&D expenditures might be worth if they were invested elsewhere. DiMasi calculated actual out-of-pocket R&D costs for drugs in the study at $403 million per new drug."

The most interesting thing about patent law as it applies to big pharma is how big pharma has managed to gather bunches of conservative intellectuals, the ones that like to talk about the wonders of competition, to propagandize for government protected monopoly in the name of bogus "property rights." There's an old scorecard of who, within the power elite that governs us, has sucked the drug company tit, brought to us by the Consumer Project on Technology. Turns out there's a lot of little porkers on the list. Check it out! Augustan England had its rotten boroughs -- we have our power elite. Lucky England!