September 11, 2010
The Post ran a badly confused article on unauthorized drugs and the harm they allegedly cause. The article uses the terms “counterfeit” and “fake” indiscriminately. It reports that some of the drugs bear the names of major manufacturers, indicating that many do not. Only the former can be viewed as “counterfeits.”
The drugs that are not falsely sold as the products of major manufacturers are bought by people who understand that they are not buying a drug produced by a major drug company. This means that they are likely buying the drug because it sells for a price that is far below the price of the drugs sold by the major manufacturers.
For this reason, the article’s assertion that:
“Experts say the global fake-drug industry, worth about $90 billion, causes the deaths of almost 1 million people a year and is contributing to a rise in drug resistance,”
is absurd on its face. The vast majority of the people buying these drugs would almost certainly not be able to afford the drugs produced by the major drug companies. If the $90 billion figure is true, then this implies that people around the world are buying tens of billions of prescriptions of unauthorized drugs. (Legal generics often sell for $4 at major retail chains in the United States. Presumably, unauthorized copies sell for much less in the developing world.)
While not all of these prescriptions involve life-saving drugs, even if just one in a thousand of these prescriptions is for a life-saving drug then the information in the article implies that unauthorized drugs are saving tens of millions of lives every year. Of course if we used a more efficient mechanism than patents to finance research then people around the world would be able to get high quality drugs at low prices.
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