The Price of Remission

The argument in essence is that only permitting pharmaceutical companies these outrageous profits will induce them to continue investing the likewise outrageous costs of new drug development now that all the low-hanging fruit like antibiotics, and sildenafil and other antihypertensives, has been picked. This extends (usually by implication) to trivial variations in molecular chemistry which have no functional effect on a medication but which are used to extend patent protections solely on the basis of a structural change - a practice also visible in the history of one family of drugs I have mentioned, and one which without some sort of justification might be taken for an example of a law's letter being abused to violate that same law's intent.

Look, I didn't say I buy it. But you asked for the basic argument advocates make in support of such practices, and here it is.

Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1990s allowed universities to exclusively license researcher inventions to private parties. Hence:

> "Celgene had acquired the rights to thalidomide patents held by researchers at Rockefeller University in 1992."

Change Bayh-Dole law to non-exclusive licensing, but with some level of royalties paid to institution that originated the patent, and other corporations could have made the drug - and it would be a competitive market, so costs would drop due to lack of a monopoly on the drug.

This one simple change to Bayh-Dole - 'non-exclusive' - would upset the academic-corporate apple cart well beyond pharmaceuticals. Eg the PageRank algorithm created at Stanford could not have been exclusive licensed to Google - any American corporation or person could have applied for a license to the invention, entirely erasing the benefits of a monopolistic patent to the corporation.

One great benefit of this change is that corporations who wanted exclusive patents would have to finance their own private R & D divisions, instead of just capturing the output of taxpayer-financed researchers.

Yes, it's readily available to buy online from India for <$1/pill.

In practice there aren't legal repercussions. If you import scheduled drugs (adderall, opioids, etc.) and get caught that's obviously going to be a big issue. But with most prescription medications, the worst case scenario is that Customs will just toss your package. And the likelihood of that is low; the majority of the time it makes it through undetected.

I've done this in the past with another drug. In the US it was $30/month but from India I got 1000 pills for $30 + $40 expedited shipping. For me the big factor wasn't cost, but rather the convenience of not needing to go through the process of getting a prescription.