Alternatively…
2 Likes
I mean, I could definitely deal with a flood of gray market pharms.
1 Like
Most. Look at it this way, the Canadian populationa and economy is roughly equal to that of Texas but their money has to be spread out over a much greater area. Also due to socialized medicine they already won’t be getting the most cutting edge drugs to keep costs down. But if it’s a reformulation that’s less of a reason for them to bring it there because now they could face competition from local generic pharma companies so they’d leave however depending on the drug the population size of the people who need a given drug may not be great enough to support the manufacture of every new drug we make here so the local generics companies would only be making the more common ones (as socialized medicine would cap what the drugs can cost to a small population) but for rarer diseases they find themselves in a position where they’d have to come here or go to some other country that supports US patents just to get treatment.
2 Likes
Doesn’t matter. The US has the power here. This would be a losing battle for them. They put tariffs on our stuff and we didn’t on theirs so now we are returning the favor. They remove the tariffs on our imports and our tariffs go away.
It may be a lot harder to get other countries to do the US a favour, but realistically the historic bonds that link countries together won’t destroyed by a single president (unless he blows up the world).
I will say that I find it slightly disturbing how easily Americans feel their country is defined by their president. The president certainly has power, but I feel it’s nothing compared to the symbolic power that their president wields over the American mind.
Even in a parliamentary system, where a majority government is a “time-limited dictatorship”, the ruling power influences society, but they don’t define it.
Anyway, among the international leaders, I think there’s little danger of the same mindset. Everyone understands that Trump too, shall pass. (And if this is the beginning of 50 years of American strong-men, then indeed, the world will change. But one president doesn’t get to define the USA forever. Even Trump.)
3 Likes
I’d love to see them nationalize anything Trump owns in Canada just to see if he screams on TV. That alone would be worth the trouble I think.
12 Likes
That would work. And be hilarious.
It would work because, when steel mill workers suffer, fuck them they’re poor.
Cutting into pharma hurts RICH people.
That’s why Madoff is in jail…he stole from the wealthy.
1 Like
The whole “ethanol in gas” thing is just a way to prop up corn growers.
There’s no environmental (production) benefit, no emissions benefit, no gain in fuel efficiency.
Really, using a partially pre-oxidized hydrocarbon is kind of silly.
8 Likes
Fifty-four Forty or Fight!
I think they’re doing themselves a favor on that one.
1 Like
2 Likes
If by “scripts” you mean “scrips”, a nickname for prescriptions, you don’t buy those from pharmacies, you are prescribed them by doctors, and getting an American-written prescription filled at a Canadian pharmacy has to be kind of an emergency - they’ll give you enough blood-pressure pills until a doctor’s office opens, then you have to go pay a Canadian doctor to look at your prescription, hear your story, and write you one from a doc licensed in Canada.
I’m not aware of Canadian docs who would then write a scrip for a six-month supply, either; he’d fall under a lot of reviews by his licensing board.
We aren’t in the national business of getting you around your monopoly, you’d have to do that yourself.
But changing that policy is obviously the threat here.
1 Like
This reminds me of Glenn Greenwald’s comment about the Panama Papers. He noted that there are so many of these “tax refuges” in the Caribbean, the Orkney Islands, all over the world.
Basically, they use national sovereignty to help clients break tax laws of OTHER nations. Greenwald points out that any small nation helping clients break copyright laws, much less pharma-IP laws, would be put under intolerable economic and legal pressure, if not military coercion, to stop doing that - at once.
But nobody even talks about doing this for tax evasion, because sustaining copyright and patent laws benefits powerful and wealthy actors, and BREAKING tax laws also benefits powerful and wealthy actors.
Canada will not do this. Not because it is afraid of the United States militarily responding or anything costly like that, but for the same reason nobody takes a stand against tax havens.
We got wealthy and powerful actors ourselves, alas, ones that benefit from these laws. Trudeau will not even THREATEN this. It’ll go nowhere. [I hope I’m wrong…but doubt it a lot.’
1 Like
Just the threat would probably be enough to get some leverage. No actual patent law destruction required.
1 Like
What comic is that from?
“We Stand on Guard” which is about the US invasion of Canada after the inevitable consequences of our current water allocation and pollution policies become undeniable.
It was supposed to be very controversial although I did not find it so. Good artwork, in any case, if you like that sort of thing.
2 Likes
Maybe for novice investors who don’t have a firm grasp of international law, who in all likelihood would sell holdings in US pharma companies, dropping their prices (which would be an awesome time to buy the stocks as they would recover before the resolution of the trade dispute BTW). However if you have half a brain on the matter you’d know nothing would happen. Trump would know it. Congress would know it. Trudeau would know it. The pharma companies would know it. The mainstream media would know it (this site just said so much wrong I needed to set the record straight). Anyone saying anything different would just be a sensationalist fear monger, just like the author of this article.
1 Like
This mope sucks at everything.
1 Like
A very nice racket, getting governments to act as the enforcement arm of drug dealers. Wish I had that kind of sauce, although I’d use it for something else.
Am I right in guessing you’re not a fan of socialized medicine?
1 Like
Huh? We do put tariffs on their goods. Take Japan, no tariffs on our cars, 2.5% on theirs, but American cars don’t sell in Japan. Why? They’re not as reliable, thanks to currency exchange rates they’re more expensive, American automakers to advertise and push sales, and most of all, which goes to Japan, any old English colonial country, England, and others, other than Jeep, no American car manufacturer builds cars customized for the market in nations that have right hand drive. Pull up to the curb, you don’t get to exit onto the sidewalk, you open the door and exit into the street. Look at China. Amassive essentially peasant population that’s not buying a lot of consumer goods. But boy people sure destruction our retail environment by only shopping at Walmart buying stuff made by people who made $3.00 a week. Strangely, Europe held on. Giving its workers decent wages, great benefits, and great time off. We only rewarded executives and are the ones whining, and have people whose wages haven’t gone up for 4 decades, who’s benefits have decreased, and are the only industrialized country in the free world that doesn’t guarantee workers a single paid day off. But we do let people and corporations give endlessly and often anonymously to political campaigns.
1 Like
Like it or not, patent law helped build this country. Due to the nature of royally granted patents back in the day many of the founding fathers hated the concept. Although Thomas Jefferson was one of the more strongly against patents he saw it as an opportunity to build technology developed in this country dragging us away from simply being an agriculturally based economy to more by offering public exchange of ideas in exchange for a limited monopoly. Because before the patent system we had guilds which each had closely held trade secrets, each region guild had their own secrets and as a result we did not advance as we could have. Part of the patent law is that the apparatus/method/compound cannot be publicly used or published in this country. As a result many apprentices brought their masters technologies from all over here to make a stake for themselves and we grew to become the innovative powerhouse we are today.
Now due to the competitive nature of business and the massive scale of industries created by globalization this protection is necessary to recover costs associated with development, marketing, distribution, manufacture. It is not merely a blank check, because for every single Viagra which generates billions of dollars for a company, there is a vioxx which leads to a massive law suit no one saw coming. Further there are tens, even hundreds of pharmacueticals which never make it to market as it is found to be dangerous during animal testing. Each one costing tons of money. They are in business to make money. They have people to pay each one who has a family, maybe kids or pets, a home. They deserve that don’t they?
Also not a fan of socialized medicine. In poor countries, there’s no one who will be able to afford it (definitely not the government). The only reason a poor country may get it is if there’s a lot of tourism to drive sales. In wealthier ones they take their time moving up to more recent expensive ones, may face more side effects from older less effective medicines. Typically if they have money they come here for treatment. Trust me, I work with a lot of lawyers all over the world.
If there’s no patent in a country they can manufacture it there, however they would not be able to import it into a country with a patent (huge law suit), so they would have a limited market and would need different set ups for large scale batches of different drugs and skilled labour for the assembly of said equipment and manufacture of the drugs.
