If you had the power to save someone’s life, would you let them die? The pharmaceutical industry is the most powerful and profitable business on earth yet it is effectively denying millions of people access to the drugs that could save them. Twelve-year old Jairo is one of many who die of AIDS-related illnesses in the developing world, but unlike them, he will not go unnoticed. Jairo’s last weeks are captured on Dying for Drugs, a documentary by Brian Woods, the maker of the Emmy award winning The Dying Rooms. The film is the result of a two-year investigation into how far drugs companies will go to get their drugs approved and obtain the prices they want. It shows the human cost of corporate greed in stark and harrowing detail. The film begins in Kano, a town in Nigeria, where the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer carried out experiments for a new meningitis drug on children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents. In Canada, it recounts the experiences of Dr Nancy Olivieri, a leading expert at the University of Toronto on the blood disease thalassemia. Olivieri spotted flaws in L1, the drug produced by the company Apotex; when she raised her fears she was removed from the programme by the drugs company and legally gagged. In South Korea, Woods highlights the cases of leukaemia patients who were the test subjects for Glivec, produced by the Swiss-based company Novartis. Following the successful trial the drug was introduced at a price of 19 dollars a pill – around 55 000 for a year’s treatment. One patient, Yung, can only afford Glivec for a few more months, and can’t bring himself to tell his wife. And in Honduras, Woods meets Jairo whose family could not afford the drugs to ease his suffering. As Woods points out, “It’s very easy for people in Europe and the US to read about people in the developing world suffering because they can’t afford drugs, but these changes are going to affect the price of medicine here.” In fact, the power of the pharmaceutical companies is all pervasive; Woods first became aware of the issue in the research for his last film on Slavery in the Ivory Coast. “Once you start looking at the pharmaceutical industry, once you start digging, then you realise that all sorts of bogeys start coming out of the woodwork.” With the first half of the programme he therefore aims to open our eyes to these practices – “What we were seeking to do by demonstrating the way unethical practices have been followed in the past in Nigeria and Canada is to make it more difficult for companies to undertake unethical trials in the future. The only reason people do these things is because they think they’ve got away with it and if they’re aware that they probably won’t get away with it then they probably won’t do it, so the film has an important preventative role.” The implications of Yung’s and Jairo’s stories are potentially even more threatening. At present, companies like Pfizer and Novartis have patents on their products in most jurisdictions which means that the only hope for patients of finding drugs at a lower price is to obtain a generic drug – one that is effectively the same as the expensive drug but produced using different methods. India is currently the source of many of these generic drugs which are sometimes sold for less than one dollar a pill, in the case of Glivec, one twentieth of the cost of Novertis’ product, but the World Trade Organisation, under pressure from the pharmaceuticals, has decided that India must introduce full patent protection from the end of next year. Dr Drummond Rennie of the Journal of the American Medical Association regards the patenting measures that the big companies are seeking, as the “worst possible future,” that they are “pushing life or death.” This is nowhere more evident than Woods’ portrayal of Jairo’s final days. “Filming Jairo was the hardest piece I’ve ever done. When we met him, although he was terribly ill and desperately thin, you think, well he’s going to die probably, but maybe he’s going to die within a few months. In the week or so we were in Honduras he went dramatically downhill but before he did, he was up and about, he was making jokes. There’s a bit in the film when Mercedes, his grandmother says “Oh Brian speaks Spanish” – I can’t really speak Spanish – so I say “How are you?” and he just looks at me for about ten seconds and then says, “Is that it?” We established a relationship with him and therefore to literally see him dying in front of me… I was in the back of the pick up and he was in front in the cabin and his uncle just banged on the window and that was it, he was dead… it was very tough.” Dying for Drugs was watched on the night by a million people. Since then Woods says that Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres have been inundated with calls. The day after the programme aired, GlaxoSmithKline announced a huge cut in the price of its AIDS drugs in the developing world, “I can’t believe that that was a coincidence. I’m sure they didn’t do it immediately, but I’m equally sure that the timing was influenced by the film…I’m sure that this film made a difference.” The film-makers have not escaped the legal threats that Olivieri encountered. The day after it aired, True Vision, the production company, received a letter from Apotex’s lawyers stating that if the film was shown again, as it was scheduled to be, then it would be regarded as malicious and would be reflected in any subsequent damages from legal prosecution. Woods however, stresses the importance of media exposure of these issues, “The turning point was The Dying Rooms because that really has transformed the situation in orphanages in China.” Woods believes that under increasing pressure from the media and the public, the patenting system that the drugs companies are lobbying for cannot continue. The British government is currently drawing up a parallel pricing policy with the British based pharmaceuticals that makes drugs available under different names and lower prices in the developing world. Even in the US, where George Bush’s cabinet includes several ex-CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, there have been recent concessions over the price of drugs because so many senior citizens cannot afford the medicine. These recent developments reflect the fact that the pricing and patenting practices of the pharmaceuticals are a global problem; as Woods says “this is so important that I’m sure it will have to change.” Like so many people, Woods says that he had “always wanted to do something ‘important’, but didn’t really know what that was going to mean, what that was going to be, but then I started to make documentaries and realised that you could actually, with the right kind of film, make a difference.”
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003
Dying for Drugs
