Humane Retreat on AIDS Drugs

Poor nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia cannot begin to pay the $10,000 to $15,000 a year that multinational drug companies charge them for each patient’s “cocktail” combination of AIDS drugs. For these nations, the choice is between watching their citizens die by the thousands or bending and sometimes breaking international patent laws.

South Africa, for example, decided in 1997 to import less expensive generic copies of patented Western medicines without the permission of the manufacturers of the original drugs. The South African Medicines Act is still tied up in the country’s courts and has not taken effect. But in a 1999 executive order, the Clinton administration essentially sided with South Africa and declared that if a nation is facing a health crisis, the United States would not seek sanctions against it for patent violations.

In announcing last week that it will not reverse the Clinton executive order, the Bush administration committed only to refrain from seeking sanctions against South Africa. However, President Bush should extend that noninterference policy to other needy nations, like India, Thailand and Brazil. Brazil, by manufacturing anti-retroviral drugs itself, it has cut their cost by nearly 80%. Brazil’s commitment to containing AIDS has also produced clinics to supervise the treatment effectively.

Multinational pharmaceutical firms have been fighting these cheaper gray-market drugs in courts around the world, fearing they eventually will make their way into Western markets. But markets like Brazil’s have not undercut pharmaceutical profit margins, which remain the highest among those of industrial sectors in the West.

Should Africa somehow manage to begin gray-market production and distribution, it’s absurd to think it would have enough of the drugs left to flood Western markets after meeting the dire needs in its own region. In sub-Saharan Africa, 5,500 AIDS victims are buried every day.

Even if African nations somehow mustered the wealth and will to create a surplus of the drugs, companies would be well positioned to fight their importation into the United States, just as they successfully fought efforts last year in Congress that would have allowed Americans to buy U.S.-made drugs at the discounted rates Canadians now enjoy.

Pharmaceutical companies were large contributors to the Bush presidential campaign, but there is too little monetary reward and too much moral pain in continuing their quest to fully enforce patents and pricing in the Third World. The president, who has made a strong first step, can surely help the companies see that their futures lie elsewhere.