PER 2015
source 12
Moral ambiguity is rife within drug firms. However, from an economics perspective, CEO’s of drug firms aim to maximise profits and increase shareholder’s returns. These profits may go to their own private pockets, but often are used to fund future research for new drugs in undiscovered fields of medicine, for example, the elimination of dengue in the South Eastern world. Since drug resistance will only be increasing with future generations, one may argue that firms should be allowed to charge high prices for drugs in order to ensure a healthy population in the future. Surely, one would argue, we want our future generations to be well and to sustain life on earth. However, one may argue that such drug costs should be lowered for those in third world countries. In this way, therefore, one may argue that the high cost of drugs in more developed countries compensates for the lower costs in less economically developed countries, and that private insurers can fork out the money. Moreover, many a biochemist will agree that the high costs are rightly justified, not only due to the amount of time, effort and money injected into the project, but also to allow the poor to receive this mediation at lower costs. In today’s society, is it assumed that the rational logic of a company is to maximise profits. In this way, drug companies aim to maximise profits, in what could be considered an immoral fashion, by renewing patents for drugs such that generic copies cannot be produced. Often, these generic copies come at a much lower cost to the individual in need and so, the fact that they cannot be produced suggests that drug firms are little deterred by the poverty of patients and are driven by lucrative profit margins. In this way, drug firms exploit the vulnerable, weak and frail. If laws were passed such that a firm can only patent a drug once, this would prevent drug firms patenting the drug several times during production, trials and release. An example of generic copies of drugs can be seen by a certain drug for liver cancer; ‘Sorafenib tosylate is a drug for liver cancer patented by German pharmaceutical company Bayer and marketed as Nexavar’, ‘In the UK, where an affordable generic
12 www.phrma.org
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