Aug 18, 2008

Drug companies are a boon to stockholders, and those who say otherwise are our enemies

Unfortunately, not a very funny entry for this one, since I can find little humour in someone who so obviously overlooks the role of drug companies in enforcing intellectual copyrights so that they may profit off of human suffering.

Stephen Pollard, on the other hand, has no problem with this. And to do so, he uses the single weakest fucking strawman ever. And I am no stranger to weak strawmen, employing several as useful punching bags when I cannot be bothered to read a ridiculous argument from the BNP before mocking it.

But like I keep pointing out, I am not a serious writer getting paid for my work.

Anyway, back on topic. No Stephen, people don't care about pharmaceutical companies making profits, per se. What they care about is when people like Dr. Yusef Hamied are charged for making affordable generics, because most people in the Third World cannot afford the inflated prices of Western drug companies, and then companies like Dr. Hamied's get dragged over the coals because they violated an intellectual copyright.

Profits over lives. People cannot pay the prices of the best drugs, but hey, who gives a fuck about them, they're poor and foreign, right? Almost not really people, in a way, right? And someone does come along, and does give a fuck, and violates a couple of laws in doing so, and he's suddenly a fucking criminal. Yeah, right. Fuck that noise.

Copyright is the elephant in your article, the thing you dare not mention. Because if intellectual copyright in the arena of drugs research and production was reformed, then these companies wouldn't have such a strangehold over the worldwide production, less people would be dying of perfectly curable illnesses, and more people would be profiting. Admittedly, those profits would not be especially high, being spread out as they are over several companies, but they would still exist.

But that might affect share prices, right? And we couldn't ever have that now, could we?

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