USA: The Pharmaceutical Industry Stalks the Corridors of Power
by Julian Borger, The Guardian Unlimited
February 13th, 2001
Washington teems with a thousand industrial lobbyists. They cluster around the band of luxury offices and expensive restaurants which stretches from the White House to the Capitol building - a two-mile axis along which money and power are constantly traded.
In this pantheon of corporate muscle, no industry wields as much power as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), a pressure group breathtaking for its deep pockets and aggression, even by the standards of US politics.
There was a time not long ago when the corporate giants that PhRMA represents were merely the size of nations. Now, after a frenzied two-year period of pharmaceutical mega-mergers, they are behemoths which outweigh entire continents.
The combined worth of the world's top five drug companies is twice the combined GDP of all sub-Saharan Africa and their influence on the rules of world trade is many times stronger because they can bring their wealth to bear directly on the levers of western power.
In the struggle between western patent rights and the rest of the world's need for affordable medicine, the few concessions handed to the developing nations in the last year of the Clinton administration are likely to be reversed under Bush. The US government is expected to return to its customary role as a battering ram for the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the principle of intellectual property.
Until recently, the industry hedged its political bets, backing the Democrats and Republicans more or less evenly at election time. But at the last election, it gambled. With billions at stake in a heated debate over prescription drug prices at home and a growing number of patent disputes abroad, the drugmakers stacked their chips disproportionately behind George Bush. The industry spent nearly 70% of its unprecedented $24.4m campaign war chest on the Republicans.
The wager paid off - just - and PhRMA has emerged at the apotheosis of its political clout, with grateful Republicans running the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. Politicians it has supported are now in key positions and it deploys 297 lobbyists - one for every two members of Congress.