Published : Thursday, October 13, 2011 | Louie Logarta
Column: BLURBAL THRUSTS | Daily Tribune Newspaper
There’s this story that was brought to my attention just recently by some consumer advocates which I think you guys should be aware of. It’s about cheaper medicines. Cheaper than the ones presently being sold today in the drug stores.
Frankly, I do not understand why it’s not getting too much publicity in the media despite its significance to Juan de la Cruz, which includes you and me. As far as I know, the story was featured in the Daily Tribune and Manila Times, but that’s about it.
Could advertising revenues have anything to do this?
In any case, it’s about this P15-million civil case filed by an obscure drug company, Sahar Pharma, for “malicious prosecution” against Pfizer Philippines, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche Philippines (ironically these turkeys are multinationals) which are among the handful of corporate giants controlling the local pharmaceutical industry.
As told to us, the three drug firms had filed a case sometime ago against Sahar — one of the few dealers of generic drugs around that supplies select hospitals and drug stores — to stop it from importing the same kind of medicines that they are selling in the Philippines, some of them with a 700-percent profit margin.
They held that parallel importation would allow patented medicines to be purchased from the cheapest source (in this case, India) without consent of the patent holder.
Said case was however rejected by the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals and the Department of Justice as the complaining drug companies failed to prove that existing laws prohibited the parallel importation of medicines. Figuring prominently in the rulings was the government’s ongoing effort to encourage competition through parallel importation of essential drugs to make them more affordable and within easy reach of the masses.
Sahar Pharma’s position on the issue of parallel importation was buttressed with the passage of Republic Act 9502 or the Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act of 2008, the pet legislation of former Sen. Mar Roxas (now the DoTC secretary) which would ensure the availability of more affordable medicines by requiring drug outlets to carry a variety of brands, including those sourced from countries where medicines are sold at prices that don’t hit you in the gut, unlike here in the Philippines.
What the law does is it effectively eliminates all hindrances to the parallel importation of medicines, so now anyone who registers with the Bureau of Food and Drugs can legally import cheap medicines and sell them to the public generically, like you can’t import paracetamol tablets from Indonesia and then sell them under the brand name “Biogesic” which is the local market leader since that is owned by another industry giant, United Laboratories (Unilab).
In 2005, President Arroyo issued Executive Order 442 designating the Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC) as the lead coordinating agency to make quality medicines available, affordable and accessible to the greater masses of Filipinos. It was allowed to engage in parallel importation of low-priced generic medicines from countries like India and Pakistan.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in a special report some years ago said that Pfizer, an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation, was reaping obscene profits from countrywide sales of amlodipine besylate, a maintenance drug taken by millions of Filipinos suffering from hypertension, which is more popularly known as “Norvasc.”
According to the PCIJ, Norvasc was sold back then over the counter at P44.75 per 5mg tablet and P74 per 10mg tablet. But in India, Norvasc was being marketed by Pfizer under the brand name “Amlogard” for only P7.77 per 5mg tablet and P11.67 per 10mg tablet.
What better way to demonstrate the stranglehold that multinational drug companies such as Pfizer, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline have on the Philippine market, from which they have cumulatively earned close to P1 trillion during the past decade.
This is the principal reason the Philippines is saddled with sky-high prices of medicines, several times more expensive than those in most countries. It ranks second to Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, in having the most expensive medicine prices in Southeast Asia despite the passage by Congress of the Generic Drugs Act over two decades ago, another one of those useless laws passed by the Philippine legislature.
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