Cipla chief Yusuf Hamied stands up against drug monopoly

Cipla chairman Yusuf Hamied, who has long battled global pharmaceutical majors to ensure that developing countries have access to life-saving drugs, has said that a pricecontrol mechanism is required in India for essential medicines sold under a monopoly. "The right to live should not be contingent on the ability to pay. Lives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of corporate profit and greed," Hamied said.

Acknowledging that inventors of new drugs produced to tackle HIV/ AIDS, cancer and hepatitis should be rewarded for their work , Hamied insisted that Western pharmaceutical majors should not be allowed to patent "frivolous inventions". " A price control system is needed ( in India) for monopoly drugs. … If a drug is essential, it shouldn't be sold under a monopoly. Indian companies are not willfully violating the law," he said at an event organised by the external affairs ministry to highlight the problem of access to lifesaving drugs in developing countries.

Indian law stricter
"Indian patent law is stricter than that of the US- it doesn't allow frivolous inventions to be patented," he said. Hamied, who earned the ire of western firms when Cipla offered a three- drug anti- HIV regimen to African countries for onethirtieth of the standard price in 2001, said that he had often been called a ' pirate' for his firm's role in producing cheap generic drugs for lifethreatening illnesses and conditions. "But I abide by the laws of the land. They can't ask me to play US laws in India," he said while speaking after the screening of a documentary Fire In The Blood. The documentary, by director and producer Dylan Mohan Gray, highlights contributions of people like Hamied and former US President Bill Clinton in providing life- saving drugs to African countries ravaged by AIDS in the 1990s.

Hamied insisted that he opposes monopoly but not patents. Under India's patent law of 1972, the government allowed the patenting of a process, not a product in the key areas of food and health. However, when India joined the World Trade Organisation in 2005, it could no longer produce generic versions of drugs under a monopoly, he said.

Cipla's AIDS initiative in African countries had saved some 10 million lives. "Health care can't be looked at only as a business; you have to save lives. ... We have to put our heads together; the third world cannot afford the absolute power of monopoly," Hamied said.

Hamied noted that Indian companies provide 92 per cent of anti-retro viral drugs, worth about $ 8 billion, to developing countries while the remaining, sold by western pharmaceutical firms, is worth $ 16 billion. "Besides, drugs from only a handful of countries are considered acceptable. When Cipla invents drugs, the West doesn't accept them," he said.

Hamied reiterated Cipla's offer to provide technology and know-how to third world countries to set up pharmaceutical units to make life- saving drugs.

He also pointed out there would be a growing need for such medicines in India, which has some 60 million hepatitis patients, 110 million affected by mental illnesses and 80 million with cardiac problems.

Courtesy: Mail Today