Corporations Killed Medicine. Here's How to Take It Back

Corporations Killed Medicine. Here's How to Take It Back

Saturday, 13 February 2016 00:00
By Fran Quigley, Foreign Policy in Focus | Report


Along the path toward the creation of a global capitalist system, some of the most significant steps were taken by the English enclosure movement.

Between the 15th to 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described the process by coining the term land-grabbing. To British historian E.P. Thompson, it was "a plain enough case of class robbery."

More recently, a similar enclosure movement has taken place. This time, the fenced-off commodity is life-saving medicine. Playing the role of modern-day lords of the manor are pharmaceutical corporations, which have taken a good that was once considered off-limits for private profiteering and turned it into an expensive commodity. Instead of displacing small landholders, this enclosure movement causes suffering and death: Billions of people across the globe go without essential medicines, and 10 million die each year as a result.

Many people curse the for-profit medicine industry. But few know that the enclosure erected around affordable medicines is both relatively new and artificially imposed. For nearly all of human history, attempting to corner the markets on affordable medicines has been considered both immoral and illegal.

It's time now to reclaim this commons, and reestablish medicines as a public good. ...............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34784-corporations-killed-medicine-here-s-how-to-take-it-back