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From International Socialism (1st series), No.17, Summer 1964, p.2.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Ferranti affair, in which the firm making the Bloodhound missile were found to have extracted a profit of five million pounds on a total outlay of seven million, and were induced to disgorge a large part of it, reveals some of the complications of the permanent arms economy. On the one hand. Government money is fair game for business and indeed provides a necessary booster to the expanding market; on the other, international commercial competition places a ceiling on arms expenditure and impels the Government’s auditors and, behind them, the armed forces, to demand the maximum of megadeaths per pound – and no wastage. Here Ministry officials and business representatives meet with a cordiality and in such numbers, speak, in such common terms, that often neither side really knows who represents whom ; there, Government servants are expected to hold the ring for the big combines and to champion the general interests of capital. Ferranti’s profit was no less legitimate than all profit; Ferranti’s profit was exceptional even by monopoly standards, and so unjustified. Ferranti had to be pulled up, but gently. No punishment – that was left for the mail train robbers who made off with half the sum and received thirty years apiece. Death and disease are profitable in more ways than one, however. The drug industry’s ‘bargaining power has always lain in the monopoly of a drug conferred by patents’. (Economist, 4 April). It is a bargaining power exploited to the limit, so much so that even a tepid Tory Ministry of Health has been impelled, since 1961, to buy some of the standard pharmaceuticals prescribed under the National Health Service in countries which do not recognise drug patents. The results have been startling. Proprietary tetracycline (an antibiotic) sells at about £45 for 1,000 tablets. Last year, imported tetracycline was sold to hospitals at £6 10s. per thousand tablets, and this year the price is expected to drop to £4–5. (Times, 14 April).
An American Senate Committee had an opportunity .to go into the matter in some detail. In their Report on the Administered Prices of Drugs (Kefauver Report, 87th Congress, Report No.488) they found, to take a random example, that an arthritic patient on any of the standard branded drugs would be paying about $30 a month for medicines, for which his chemist would pay about $18, and which would cost $1.50 to produce. They found – again one example of many – that it paid American Cynamid to sell Achromycin (their brand of tetracylin) to Argentinian chemists for $1.19 per sixteen capsules; and that the same company was selling the same product at the same time, also to chemists, for $6.92 in poverty-stricken India, $5.10 in the United States, $5.45 in England (Argentina does not recognise drug patents, the others do). Most important of all, the Committee found that ‘Drugs discovered in foreign countries without patents outnumber those discovered in countries with such protection in the order of 10 to 1’. (p.119)
Drug companies could be indicted for ever. Their cynical exploitation of human suffering and fear is equal to that of the arms manufacturers. Their profit-making at our expense is as calculated; their professions as hypocritical; their motivations as disgusting. A Labour Government that fails to nationalise both must surely be condemned in the same terms. As it is Labour has a lot to live down – the failure to take over armaments between 1945 and 1951, and the re-imposition of drug patents, after a lapse of thirty years, in 1949.
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