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India - the ‘pharmacy of the world's poor’


Glivec is produced by Novartis in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). Glivec as a life-saving, breakthrough drug for certain forms of cancer, The treatment cost is 130,000 rupees ($2400) a month. An Indian generic alternative is priced at cheaper 8000 to 12000 rupees a month.

The Indian Supreme court just granted a victory to the sick all over the planet when it refused the Swiss pharmaceutical giant a new patent for the tinkering it did with its anti-leukemia drug Glivec.

Novartis’ website declares: “We are committed to provide access to medicine for patients worldwide.” But how is this possible where the sick find their drugs prohibitively expensive?

It was only when Indian firms began to make cheap copies of HIV drugs that it became possible more than a decade ago to contemplate the treatment of millions of people in impoverished countries of Africa, where the AIDS epidemic was at its worst

“This is a huge relief for the millions of patients and doctors in developing countries who depend on affordable medicines from India, and for treatment providers like MSF,” Dr. Unni Karunakara, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)

Patenting the revolution

Thanks to the World Trade Organisation and something called the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), we, the people, have no democratic control over intellectual property law in any way, shape, or form.

In 1886, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was first accepted, the first worldwide treaty with the intention of unifying and internationalising the various individual states' copyright laws. Three years prior, in 1883, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was first accepted. In 1893, the Bureaux Internationaux Réunis pour la Protection de la Propriété Intellectuelle (BIRPI) was set up to oversee these two treaties. The BIRPI was superseded in 1967 by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

This is where things start to go wrong. The WIPO is actually one of the 17 specialised agencies of the United Nations, and this posed a 'problem' for the United States, the European Union, Japan, and several other developed nations, because being a UN agency, every member state's vote counted equally. This meant that in matters related to IP, the world's developing nations could exert far more influence than developed nations. You know, democracy at work at the international state level.

To address this "problem", the developed nations shifted IP regulation out of WIPO and into the World Trade Organisation with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, in 1994. This is essentially a re-implementation of the Berne and Paris Conventions, but coupled with international trade, and under an organisation more easily controlled by the developed world. 

Countries can just decide not to sign TRIPS, right? Well, no, not exactly. The most brilliant move corporations in the developed world have ever made is that they managed to get TRIPS tied to membership of the World Trade Organisation. In other words, signing and implementing TRIPS is a requirement for membership of the WTO. Since membership of the WTO is essentially a requirement for participating in international trade, not being a member is not an option for any modern country. Leaving the WTO is a death sentence for a country's economy.

The end result is simple. Even if a majority of voters in a country want a drastic reduction in IP rights to modernise IP law and adapt it to modern times, it simply cannot be implemented. This effectively means that copyright law, patent law, trademark law, and all other associated laws, exist in a protected legal bubble over which we, as voters, have zero democratic control. In other words, current IP law exists entirely outside of the democratic process - effectively making it totalitarian. This far-reaching and incredibly complex set of legal constructs that affect almost every sector of our economy exists entirely outside of the democratic process. In fact, things like ACTA or SOPA? The next step is that they will simply be introduced as part of the WTO, just like TRIPS, or even as an amendment to TRIPS. Outside of any democratic control, they will be enacted in such a way that individual states cannot resist it, because doing so would endanger your WTO membership. You often hear people say, "If you don't like our current IP regime, change it! You live in a democractic country, right? Make your vote heard!" You can vote for all the Pirate Parties in the world, but it won't matter. It won't change anything, because it cannot be changed. Democracy is all fine and dandy, but when it endangers the corporate bottom line, they will find a way to circumvent it.