By Christian Alexander
As I mentioned previously, if you are watching television for any length of time, some sort of new pharmaceutical product will appear on screen, touting how much better your life will be if you take this drug or that.
The thing is you don’t even have to own a television to learn of these new pills. One trip to your doctor’s office, after he or she has been wined and dined by a representative from the drug companies, and he or she will be telling you how wonderful they are too.
Pharmacists are not immune either. I have a close friend who works for one of the biggest pharmacies in the country. He informed me that a pharmaceutical representative took not only the pharmacist, but the entire department out to a posh restaurant for dinner where just about the only topic was the new pill he was selling.
Doctors and pharmacists aside for a moment, let me take one more journey back to television land. Since every other commercial on TV these days is for some sort of pill, I tend to tune them out or change the channel. On this particular occasion, I had misplaced the remote and since I’ve forgotten how to change the channel manually, I watched the commercials.
After learning how to make my whites even brighter, I was pleased to see a very attractive, muscular man climbing up a mountain. I was equally charmed by the next man, also attractive, jumping off a cliff to go hang gliding. I was infatuated with these fine specimens of manhood until I realized what the commercial was about. A drug commercial, to be sure, but a whole new class of drug commercial. This one told me that HIV/AIDS was no longer a death sentence. It had become a “manageable condition.” I would really like to know when exactly that change in thinking happened and who proposed it? That way, I could call a guy who knows a guy in Jersey to give them a “manageable condition.”
Fine, there are new treatment options out there for those who are just joining the ranks of the HIV community. But, there are a lot more old dogs like me, who have lost too many friends and loved ones, and perhaps wasted their lives because they were all but told they were dying. For this group, these new medications don’t work.
As I’ve done before, I decided to play detective again and do some research on this new pill that had in one felt swoop changed HIV from a death sentence to a (I love this term) “manageable condition.” I passed over pages and pages of information and the more I read, the more distraught I became.
At one point, mid-way through, I had to take one of my tranquilizers again because what I was reading I just refused to accept. This HIV medication that they were advertising as “brand new” was, in fact, just a combination of three older drugs that have expired patents.
The average patent life, by FDA guidelines, is seven years. In combining them, they technically had come up with a new drug and therefore could renew the patent. Oh, but wait, there’s more! Even though the usual patent life is seven years, a manufacturer can tie up the rights to the patent for years after it has expired in litigation. If they don’t want to deal with the lawyers at that point, all they need do is tweak the formula for their drug a little.
And this applies to all drugs: anti-depressants, heart medication, blood sugar medication, you name it. The most common way of doing this is by taking a drug that, let’s say, you have to take two or three times a day. By taking the exact same pill and making it an extended release formula that need only be taken once, the pharmaceutical company can get a new patent for another several years. So, in theory, as long as the industry has a lot of good lawyers and a lot of good chemists, they can keep charging as much as they please for medication.
Moral of the story: Always be sure you know what you’re putting in your mouth!