Bruce
Wainwright
Olden wonder
THE CONSTANT PHARMA
Pharmaceutical companies have taken something of a kicking
in recent months with the worldwide success of the movie The Constant Gardener.
Based on the novel by John Le Carré, and for the benefit of those who
chose to go and see King Kong instead, the story involves the dubious ethical
practices of a multinational drugs company eager
to get its latest blockbuster drug onto the market and none too scrupulous
about the means of achieving this. After 40 years of writing intricate spy
novels, Le Carré has moved onto new pastures. Smersh and the KGB having
passed, we hope, into history; so Le Carré must necessarily find a
new villain and his choice has fallen on the pharmaceutical industry.
Now to be perfectly fair to Le Carré, his creation in The Constant
Gardener is an entirely fictitious confection, having no relationship to anything
or anyone, living or dead. The drug company, Karel Vita Hudson, based in Switzerland,
is not to be confused in any way with any other Swiss drugs company of a similar,
or indeed dissimilar name.
Having said that, some of the shenanigans which the company becomes involved
in do look unfortunately familiar to anyone who has even a passing knowledge
of big pharmas. Dumping drugs which are beyond their sell-by date on medical
charities in Africa in order to gain tax relief for charitable donations;
failing to publish the less flattering findings of their research, and testing
drugs on the third world’s poor are all too familiar to those who have
observed the pharmaceutical industry’s history in the HIV epidemic over
the last 20 years.
However,
it may be as well to remember which side our bread is buttered on. Without
big pharma and the millions (or is it billions?) spent on the development
of antiretrovirals, far too many of us, myself included, would now be dead,
or, at the very least filling one of those beds now frequently empty and unused
by Aids patients. One of the criticisms levelled in the past against the pharmaceutical
companies is that too little research is carried out in areas such as Africa.
This vastly expensive and lucrative activity is usually kept securely under
the control of the parent company’s headquarters and testing is carried
out elsewhere. The failure of pharmas to develop and produce drugs to tackle
common tropical illnesses because the users don’t have the money to
pay for them is well known, as is the battle to get affordable generic antiretrovirals
past strict international patent laws. But profit and shareholder value is
the name of the game. It isn’t about the brotherhood of man, or trying
to do the decent thing; it’s profit. And to expect large corporations
to ignore that is as unrealistic as expecting a leopard to turn vegetarian;
it just isn’t going to happen and we have to keep that firmly in mind.
If there was no profit in antiretrovirals, they would not be produced.
It is also worth noting that it is highly unlikely that anyone else would
produce them either, governments included. Remember the good old USSR? The
workers’ paradise? Completely incapable of producing a decent condom,
it was common practice to use abortion as an all too regular form of contraception
(anaesthetics available on payment of ‘blat’.) Pharmas may be
motivated by profit but, thank goodness, it is motivated. Capitalism, much
like democracy, stinks; until you look at the alternatives. Our job, I would
suggest, is to do whatever we can to ensure that big pharmas behave more in
accordance with our needs, and not theirs. It is possible.
Despite the very best endeavours of George W Bush and the naked commercial
interests which pay his election expenses, the world order (whatever that
might be) has managed to find a way around some of the patent laws and has
made antiretrovirals cheaply, if not freely, available to a much wider public.
As a result, countries such as Brazil have succeeded in bringing their HIV
epidemic under control with the free distribution of drugs.
Unlike Le Carré’s Karel Vita Hudson company, the real world is
usually run by people with families who can, on occasions, be shamed into
doing the right thing.
