Hitting the Books: How Ronald Reagan torpedoed sensible drug patenting

·Senior Editor

Sun, March 13, 2022, 1:30 AM·8 min read

White House Photographic Collection, 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989

Americans pay two and a half times more for their prescription drugs than residents of any other nation on Earth. Though generic versions of popular compounds accounted for 84 percent of America's annual sales volume in 2021, they only generated 12 percent of the actual dollars spent. The rest of the money pays for branded drugs — Lipitor, Zestril, Accuneb, Vicodin, Prozac — and we have the Reagan Administration in part to thank for that. In the excerpt below from Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines, a fascinating look at the long, infuriating history of public research being exploited for private profit, author Alexander Zaitchik recounts former President Reagan's court-packing antics from the early 1980s that helped cement lucrative monopolies on name-brand drugs.

Owning the Sun cover

When Estes Kefauver died in 1963, he was writing a book about monopoly power called In a Few Hands. Early into Reagan’s first term, the industry must have been tempted to publish a gloating retort titled In a Few Years. Between 1979 and 1981, the drug companies did more than break the stalemate of the 1960s and ’70s — they smashed it wide open. Stevenson-Wydler and Bayh-Dole replaced the Kennedy policy with a functioning framework for the high-speed transfer of public science into private hands. As the full machinery was built out, the industry-funded echo chamber piped a constant flow of memes into the culture: patents alone drive innovation... R&D requires monopoly pricing... progress and American competitiveness depend on it... there is no other way...

In December 1981, the drug companies celebrated another long-sought victory when Congress created a federal court devoted to settling patent disputes. Previously, patent disputes were heard in the districts where they originated. The problem, from industry’s perspective, was the presence of so many staunch New Deal judges in key regions like New York’s Second Circuit. These lifetime judges often understood patent challenges not as threats to property rights, but as opportunities to enforce antitrust law. Local circuit judges appointed by Republicans could also be dangerously old-fashioned in their interpretations of the “novelty” standard. By contrast, the judges on the new patent court, named the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, were appointed by the president. Reagan stuffed its bench with corporate patent lawyers and conservative legal scholars influenced by the Johnny Appleseed of the Law and Economics movement, Robert Bork. Prior to 1982, federal district judges rejected around two-thirds of patent claims; the Court of Appeals has since decided two-thirds of all cases in favor of patent claims. Reagan’s first appointee, Pauline Newman, was the former lead patent counsel for the chemical firm FMC.

Hitting the Books: How Ronald Reagan torpedoed sensible drug patenting

Hitting the Books: How Ronald Reagan torpedoed sensible drug patenting

Recommend

How did the J9 in OpenJ9 get it’s name? – Ronald Servant – Medium

Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain

Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain | Ars Technic...

Apple is indeed patenting Swift programming language features

Patenting your Tech: What to Expect and Tips for a Positive Experience

Smart Patenting: How to Avoid Common Mistakes in Intellectual Property Protectio...

How Wyze Just Torpedoed Its Own Security Reputation

Ronald Coase：科斯定理

What Reagan Did for Hollywood

About Joyk