Pharmaceutical opportunism. (Up front: news and opinion from independent minds).There are more corporate scandals than meet the eye. The headlines continue to scream about Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia, and speculation mounts over investigations into Halburton, AOL/Time Warner, and other megacorporations. Now comes a thirty-two state lawsuit against Bristol Meyers-Squibb for allegedly violating federal and state antitrust laws antitrust laws n. acts adopted by Congress to outlaw or restrict business practices considered to be monopolistic or which restrain interstate commerce. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 declared illegal "every contract, combination.... by fraudulently securing patents for the anti-cancer drug Taxol and illegally manipulating regulatory and judicial proceedings judicial proceedings n. any action by a judge re: trials, hearings, petitions, or other matters formally before the court. (See: judicial) . The complaint filed June 4, 2002, claims that Bristol "repeatedly and deliberately misrepresented and concealed" the scientific research on Taxol to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, "thereby fraudulently obtaining two patents on methods of administering the drug." Then, knowing the courts had declared the patents invalid, Bristol misrepresented them in proceedings before the Federal Drug Administration to delay regulatory approval for competitors seeking to market generic versions--and then sued their competitors, charging them with patent infringement patent infringement n. the manufacture and/or use of an invention or improvement for which someone else owns a patent issued by the government, without obtaining permission of the owner of the patent by contract, license or waiver. . Taxol is based on a naturally occurring plant substance--paclitaxel--whose anti-cancer properties were developed through government-funded research. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Eliot Spitzer, attorney general for New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , one of the states which spearheaded the investigation into Bristol, the company managed to monopolize mo·nop·o·lize tr.v. mo·nop·o·lized, mo·nop·o·liz·ing, mo·nop·o·liz·es 1. To acquire or maintain a monopoly of. 2. To dominate by excluding others: monopolized the conversation. the marketing of paclitaxel-based anti-cancer drugs until October 23, 2000, and until April 2002 was one of only two companies approved to sell such drugs. Taxol cannot be purchased directly by consumers but must be administered by physicians and hospitals to patients suffering from breast, ovarian, and other cancers. A course of treatment of Taxol costs from $6,000 to $10,000, with a single dose costing approximately $1,625; on the other hand, a single dose of its generic version is about $1,200. Thus, while maintaining its monopoly, Bristol earned nearly $1 billion in 2000 from U.S. sales of Taxol; after generic versions became available in 2001, Bristol's Taxol revenues dropped to $545 million. As Spitzer put it, Americans "cannot tolerate anti-competitive and deceptive practices that allow drug companies to fatten fat·ten v. fat·tened, fat·ten·ing, fat·tens v.tr. 1. To make plump or fat. 2. To fertilize (land). 3. their bottom lines illegally at the expense of people who depend on this drug." Karen Ann Gajewski is the art director and an editor at the Humanist. |
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