Front-line international health workers appealed to MPs Wednesday to fix the fact that not a single pill has left Canada under a three-year-old regime to provide cheap generic drugs to needy countries in Africa and elsewhere.
They said the plan is unnecessarily complex and cumbersome, and does nothing to quell the intimidation of potential importing countries by brand name pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. government.
They noted some developing countries are pressured by threats of legal suits, trade sanctions, threats to withhold medicines and other retaliatory measures meant to protect patents and defend intellectual property rights.
“I worked in Rwanda, Sudan, East Timor and Peru and I've seen first-hand, and it's been painful to see, the effect of monopoly pricing of medicines,” said Carol Devine, 39, of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). “I've watched women younger than me dying in their living rooms with their children around them because they lacked access to medicine that is widely available in Western countries.”
She and Richard Elliott of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, proposed amendments to the regime — “a gift in red tape” — at a news conference before testifying at a Commons committee.
The committee is reviewing the ‘Access to Medicines Regime' under which then Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien made Canada the first country to sign onto a World Trade Organization agreement to provide generic drugs to save the lives of people with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other illnesses in poorer developing countries.
Devine and Elliott said Canada is not alone in failing to deliver lower-cost drugs through the international agreement.
No other country has either.
Nevertheless they said Canada could be the first to deliver if the Canadian regime is simplified, and that changes could take place without amending the WTO agreement.
Chief among their recommendations is any pharmaceutical firm be authorized to produce generic versions of any drug patented in Canada for export to any eligible developing country. The law now requires a separate licence for every drug order, even if it's the same drug, and sets a maximum of two years on the licence.
They proposed manufacturers be allowed to negotiate exports with groups of countries so that a single country won't be afraid of stepping forward.
“One of the beauties of what we propose is that it avoids requiring any one particular country to be disclosed at the beginning of the process just to get a very limited quantity of a generic drug,” Elliott said. “There will likely be a certain safety in numbers if developing countries can actually join together.” |
