Generic Drugs: A Million Saved Is A Million Earned.

It’s the Friday afternoon before tonight’s big football game in downtown Lotusland and I’m pretty sure a whole lotta folks are starting to breathe a little easier now that they can look at this….

Why are they breathing easier?

Well, because, as we pointed out earlier in the week, it is not entirely certain that the new magic carpet atop BC Place (you know, the bolt of cloth that allegedly cost only a few hundred million dollars or so) will actually keep the rain out.

But that, and the Devil’s Horned skyline that goes with it, is not what I want to speak about today.

Instead, I want to discuss the fact that we in this province are paying way, way to much for ‘generic’ drugs.

Now, what are ‘generic’ drugs?

Well, the first thing to understand is that they are NOT cheap-knock-offs.

And they are NOT crummy ‘no-frills’ versions of the real thing.

Instead, they are the real real thing.

However…..

Because they are no longer on patent, generic drugs can be bought and sold for close to what they actually cost to make, with a reasonable profit as part of the deal, rather than some made-up number that is often thousands of times larger than Orson Wells’ waist-size during those not-so-salad days when he started swigging down all the generic wine that Ernest and Julio Gallo could pump out of the massive cauldrons hidden underneath either the basement of a fertilizer factory in Modesto or Randy Hearst’s castle in San Simeon.

Or some such thing.

So.

What’s my real point here?

Well, as Don Cayo pointed out very adroitly in the VSun yesterday, a 75% off sale on something that is ridiculously over-priced to start with (by literally hundreds of multiples in this case) is still a ridiculous price to pay.

And the fact that the members of the Gordon Campbell Legacy government (ie. the same members that will, allegedly, be celebrating the hundreds of millions we spent to build their friends the magic carpet atop BC Place, at no cost to said friends, this evening) have locked us into just such a ridiculous ‘bargain’ that is literally costing us millions upon millions of dollars every year for no good reason at all.

Mr. Cayo demonstrates this point very well with the following example, based on the experience of the Land where Conchords apparently sometimes fly away from:

Law offers one particularly dramatic example – the widely used cholesterol-lowering statins such as Lipitor and its many imitators.

When Lipitor’s patent expired last year and generic companies were able to produce copies of the drug, I estimated that the B.C. government alone could save $24 million a year by buying cheaper substitutes – even at the high price we pay in this province. At Ontario’s price, obviously, we’d save much more.

But Law has looked at a drug called Simvastatin, in the same class as Lipitor, in Ontario and New Zealand. In the former, a pill costs about 62 cents; in the latter, three cents….

So.

Why is it, once again that the Gordon Campbell Legacists are threatening us with doom because we refuse to allow them (ie. the Legacists who will be smiling for the cameras under the magic carpet this evening) to raise more money by stripping the skin off of the backs of the folks in this province that can least afford to give them more of it?

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