Healthy Skepticism Library item: 772

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Publication type: news

NUPGE hails victory in battle to end drug patent abuse
NUPGE 2004 Dec 12

Full text:

“Evergreening has sucked billions of dollars in excessive drug prices from the wallets of Canadians over many years.” – James Clancy

The 337,000-member National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) welcomes the news that Ottawa will finally take action to limit the “evergreening” of drug patents by big pharmaceutical companies and permit cheaper generic drugs to reach the market more quickly.

Union president James Clancy says the announcement, expected today by Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, is a victory that NUPGE has been fighting for years to win.

Canada’s patent laws give big drug makers a virtual license to print money. They now enjoy a 20-year patent on new drugs before generic copies are let into the market to compete with them. Before this lucrative advantage was bestowed by the Brian Mulroney Tories in the 1980s, the patent life was 12 years.

But even 20 years has not been enough to satisfy a pharmaceutical industry hooked on huge and easy profits. Rather than let generic companies compete after 20 years, they have resorted to abusive legal strategies, such as routinely filing new patents on minor variations of the same product, to extend their market monopolies.

Consumers pay huge price

The resulting expense has been borne by Canada’s health care system, and by consumers who have been forced to pay excessive drug prices for many years beyond the legal 20-year limit. This legal finagling is known as evergreening.

“Evergreening has sucked billions of dollars in excessive drug prices from the wallets of Canadians over many years,” says Clancy. “We can only hope that the government will now live up to its word and bring this abusive practice to an end,” he said.

These strategies have been used to extend exclusive marketing rights on major drugs such as the anti-depressant Paxil, the heartburn drug Losec and Taxol, the leading treatment for breast, ovarian and lung cancer.

According to the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA), the practice of evergreening has cost consumers and the health care system well over $1 billion.

The National Union played a lead role in the fight against evergreening last year when it filed a complaint against the practice with the Competition Bureau of Canada. Other groups involved were Canadian Pensioners Concerned, the Canadian Health Coalition and the Congress of Union Retirees of Canada.

Prior to that, evergreening was condemned by Roy Romanow during his Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada.

Billions sucked out

“Evergreening artificially extends the patent life and market monopoly of the brand name drug and delays (or even prevents) market entry of more sensibly priced, therapeutically equivalent generic products,” Clancy said when the NUPGE complaint was filed with the Competition Bureau.

“The obvious effect is a substantial prevention or lessening of competition in the pharmaceutical market. Of particular concern to myself and the National Union of Public and General Employees is the fact that there is no remedy whatsoever to compensate consumers when entry of a generic drug is unnecessarily delayed.”

The Competition Bureau sat on NUPGE’s complaint for eight months, then threw the issue back to the government to resolve. Many observers feared that might end any immediate hope of reform, given the cozy historic relationship between the Liberal party (like the Conservative party) and major brand-name pharmaceutical companies.

However, the issue was taken up by Dosanjh, a former B.C. NDP premier, after he was appointed health minister following the federal election in June 2004.

Details published over the weekend in the Canada Gazette indicate that evergreening will be effectively eliminated by minimizing the types of patents that drug companies are allowed to file for a given product and by restricting the number of times they can go to court to block generic competitors.

“We hope this is a sign that the government is prepared to live up to its promise of curbing runaway drug costs by prohibiting direct-to-consumer drug advertising and implementing a national pharmaceutical strategy,” Clancy said.