About AIDS

Drug Profiteering: Silence=$

If you had a serious illness and the only drugs that would help you were extremely expensive and bore enormous profit margins, how would you react? This has been an irritant to people with HIV since the beginning.

When the first anti-HIV drug AZT was introduced in 1987, it gained immediate notoriety as the second most expensive drug in the world. Its manufacturer attempted to justify its price by saying that research and development (R&D), plus complex manufacturing processes, were responsible. Of course, that wasn't true; and community leaders hammered away and eventually forced a dramatic price reduction. (The maker still set profit records.)

But some things never change. AIDS Action, a national advocacy group, recently unveiled their report "Silence=$," exposing costly marketing and advertising, not R&D, as the main driver of high HIV drug prices.

In this time of $16,000 annual drug cocktails, the pharmaceutical companies are enjoying record profits which are the envy of American industry. Adding insult to injury, even as sick consumers are being charged a king's ransom for medications, we the taxpayers are actually picking up much of the tab for the R&D which the manufacturers allege is significantly responsible for the high prices.

No other first-tier nation in the world would tolerate our situation, and rumblings in and out of government suggest possible regulatory intervention may be coming. Instead of government intrusion, this writer would prefer to see self-restraint by the drug makers. Regardless, the current abuse cannot continue.

(For a complete discussion, see the report's full text at www.aidsac tion.org)

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