A Visit to India: Drug Prices, Research, & Global Access
[Note: AIDS activist David Scondras is also a political and public-policy expert, who served as an openly gay member of the Boston City Council for ten years. Recently he returned from a 27-day trip to India, where he met with researchers and officials on access to treatment, and on potential new research on both modern and traditional medicine. He has established a collaboration between the Boston based Search for a Cure organization and the Parkash AIDS Foundation of Mumbai, which is hoping to provide antiviral medicines manufactured in India to poor countries at cost. ]* * *
On average, drugs manufactured in India are between 1,000 and 4,000 percent cheaper than for the same product in U.S. pharmacies. Drug companies have pushed hard to stop India and other poor countries from making cheap copies of their life saving medicines by including the curtailment of these practices in the international trade agreement, the GATT [see "GATT and the Gap: How to Save Lives," AIDS Treatment News #307, November 20, 1998]. By pushing for such international agreements on trade, public agencies and our government become accomplices to stopping medicines from reaching the poor.
The costs of medicine depends on who makes it and where it is made. At the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai (Bombay), you can buy Hytrin, a sophisticated anti hypertensive, for 7 cents a tablet. A month's supply of the drug costs about $4.20. At a local pharmacy in Boston, the same drug from the same company costs $44.48, more than ten times as expensive. And the Indian price is marked up on the order of 200%.
In Boston, ranitidine (the generic equivalent of Zantac, an H-2 blocker which helps you not make stomach acid) costs 42 cents for 150 mg. The same exact product at the Taj costs less than 2 cents (1.79 cents). In other words, even the cheap, generic equivalent in the U.S. is a mere 2246% more expensive!
In fact, most drugs, including antiretrovirals, are very inexpensive to manufacture. Their prices reflect what the market will bear, not what they cost to produce. U.S. pharmaceutical firms buy the basic ingredients to antivirals in bulk from other countries at incredibly inexpensive rates.
For example AZT (zidovudine) in bulk can be purchased as of December, 1998 for 42 cents for 300 mg from the worldwide suppliers; this price reflects not only the profits to the manufacturer but also to the middleman bulk buyer. This drug is retailed at $5.82 at my local (CVS) pharmacy. This means that tableting, packaging, marketing and transporting of the medicine, plus profit, adds 1285% to the basic price, already excessive. This ridiculous price cannot be justified except in terms of what the market will bear, as it bears no real relation to cost of production. An Indian company, Cipla, based in Mumbai, sells AZT in capsule form for $1.42 per 300 milligrams, and according to local experts, Cipla is accruing 2-3 hundred percent profit margins with the drug. Yet they are selling it at less than a quarter of the price in the U.S.A.! This price could be reduced significantly more if the drug were packaged by India's state owned pharmaceutical firms.
To provide antiretrovirals to the world, there would have to be a paradigm shift in our collective decision making processes. There are choices. All of them are in the arena of public policy, not medical research. Under the present paradigm, governments have to either pay for extremely expensive drugs at very high prices and distribute them to the South [developing countries], ignore the 95% of the world that cannot afford these costs, or take actions that would bring down the costs of the drugs. And before the creativity that might solve this public policy dilemma can be unleashed, there would have to be an underlying shift in will--a paradigm shift in which saving the developing world from unnecessary illness and death becomes a priority over short term economic gains. Thus far, each alternative has been politically too costly. There are efforts being made but they are far too small even conceptually to put an end to a world of untreated disease.
Treatable AIDS-related illnesses will not end until medicine is made available to everyone who needs it. And this requires an imaginative reshaping of the political and economic decision making paradigms--primarily a reshaping that moves us away from a system which defines values in terms of short term gains and takes a longer view of self interest. For in the end, a world full of disease is bad for business.
Family Values and Science
We have designed a world in which profitability determines what will happen and what will not. Our religious and community values stress integrity, compassion toward those who are suffering, delayed gratification, honesty, sharing of resources, cooperation, collaboration, and working toward the common good. But our economic system stresses entirely contradictory values--self reliance, independence, competitiveness and immediate gratification. Our economic system does not allow much effort to be expended on research that will not have an immediate financial payoff--either because the people affected are too poor to constitute a market for end products, or because the people affected are too few to pay for the costs of the research. This is appropriate for the private sector--but for Government to stop acting as a compensating force, balancing the need for short term gain with the need for long term investment in the environment, in public health, in education, in economic stability, and in protecting society from social instability by providing a minimum degree of access to basic services for everyone--for Government to stop playing this role spells disaster for the world community.
Our inability to stop the HIV epidemic and its myriad of problems reflects more than the limitations of science. It reflects the results of a cultural shift during the latter half of this century toward a value system that equates worthwhileness with money. Ignoring this is to mis-identify the cause of many HIV treatment problems in both the North and the South. In fact, many public health problems are the direct result of a system that has slowly drifted toward using short-term financial gain as its only measure of value.
In the South, this measuring stick has led to a variety of obstacles and inequities--among them, the drug cocktails that only a very few very rich people can afford. In the North this measure short changed what science could have provided; the primary reason so little is known about drug combinations and side effects is the same reason drugs are not available at all in the South.
For example, data now suggests that certain old antiretrovirals used together can be as powerful as the famous protease-inhibitor-based drug cocktails. Had we known this when they were first approved by the FDA, we could have saved many lives. But the drugs were made by different companies and competition between them made it financially difficult for them to test their products together. Who would be liable for any problems? How would company secrets be kept? Who would benefit if the combination proved successful? Who would pay for it? These questions discourage collaborations between companies. The obvious long term scientific benefits are overshadowed by the key question of short term financial benefit to the stockholders of the companies involved.
Interestingly, an effort was made in the midst of the HIV epidemic to form a collaboration of private companies. It still exists, known by its acronym, the ICC (Inter-Company Collaboration for AIDS Drug Development), and it is trying to undertake joint efforts. Unfortunately, it has tended to prove the difficulty of making this research system work. Its very failure, in efforts that have been without question supported at the highest levels of each company, underlines the difficulty inherent in collaborative efforts between competitors in a market-driven context.
Thomas Kuhn long ago identified the key elements of successful scientific inquiry. He identified the success of science as dependent upon a central value: communality. This value holds that all truth must be accessible to everyone so that science can build upon everyone's work. To have anyone withhold or add conditions would eventually lead to many doing so, effectively stifling the growth of knowledge.
The key value of communality, however, fits poorly into corporate culture. Communality holds that all information about any subject of inquiry is to be shared with everyone. This runs completely counter to patenting and protecting discoveries, or worse, keeping them secret from everyone except those who need to know within a company.
We have engendered a culture that increasingly values nothing but money and its accumulation. Our public actions increasingly serve the money-making activities instead of controlling and balancing them with regulations and investments in the public interest. So the use of old drugs in combination to control HIV was not developed. The private sector did not look at the combination, because there was no likelihood of immediate financial return to a specific company, and there were serious legal, marketing, and other problems in cross-company collaboration.
The only other actor that could have checked out the combination was the federal government. But there was no agency empowered to find a cure to HIV--to cut the red tape, to put in place strategic plans, to force collaboration or to follow anything but academic whims and hunches that make up the basis of the efforts of the only U.S. agency directly empowered to find answers: the National Institutes of Health.
As a result many thousands of people have died and thousands more have used up the effectiveness of these drugs in the less useful context of sequential monotherapies. Who knows how many mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers of the rest of the world have died at the hand of this new god.
It is often pointed out that at the time 'we did not know better'. However, had our decision to stop HIV followed a strategic plan analogous to our effort to put someone on the moon, there is no question but that the value of using drugs in plausible combinations would have been investigated immediately. Instead, we allowed the 'private sector' to dictate the agenda.
The profit motive has been a critical part of getting treatments developed. Without it, much of the effort to locate compounds with antiviral potential might not have happened so quickly. But, like all motives, it has shortcomings. To not admit this and compensate for them in a coherent, effective way is to burden the world unnecessarily.
The two worlds of North and South are under one god--and they suffer from the limitations of that god. These result from the sociological shift from the researcher as searcher of truth and the doctor as bringer of medicine, to the researcher as part of drug development and the doctor as part of the drug sales force. Most importantly, both reflect the role governments have chosen: to facilitate the needs of the invisible hand that has reached the status of a god, rather than analyze what the public needs, and temper the god to serve our common interests.
