Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15862

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Jyothi Datta PT.
Duty cuts sought on cancer, AIDS medicines
Business Line 2009 Jun 21
http://www.shic.org.in/downloads/72nd%20SNAPshot.pdf

Full text:

An across-the-board duty slash on medicines in critical segments such as cancer and HIV/AIDS is part of the pre-budget recommendation made by the Department of Pharmaceuticals to the Union Finance Ministry.

Excise and customs duties on select drugs in these segments are already reduced or down to zero, but the department has sought an across-the-board cut in these critical segments, a ministry source told Business Line. The DoP was created last year under the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers.

Supporting the pharma industry’s efforts on the research front, the DoP has also recommended that the weighted deduction on research be extended from 2010 to 2017, the official said. At present drug companies get 125 per cent weighted deduction on research outsourced to a third party and 150 per cent on in-house research.

Despite the unconfirmed buzz that the Centre could increase duties in certain segments – including that of finished forms of medicines or formulations, the DoP has sought a continuance of excise duty on finished drug forms at 4 per cent.

Though large domestic drug majors have shifted their manufacturing plants to tax-free zones, changes in excise duty continue to affect several medium and small drug makers who have not shifted to these tax-free zones in Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Jammu and Kashmir.

After years of demanding change in the excise duties, last year’s budget had halved it to 8 per cent. Subsequently, it was reduced to 4 per cent in December last year.

Also on the DoP’s recommendation list for the pharma industry is an increase in the rate of abatement on the MRP-based excise to 60 per cent, the official said.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909