O O Ø O O O O
Move
Prescription drugs, intellectual property, and the quick fix.
I have a message for you, my American friends, who think that the answer to your health care woes is to stock up on all the “cheap prescription drugs” available here in Canada.
Please fuck off.
If you continue to pass laws protecting, extending, and generally fucking with the ingangible concept of “intellectual property,” you are going to have to deal with the consequences when it rears up and bites you in the ass.
Do you really think that continuing to parcel off the intellectual commons into tiny bits of “exclusive property,” with no allowances for what the people get back from the arrangement, is utterly without consequence?
Combine this with whining about the pathetic state of funding for health care, when your country is pouring billions of your children’s dollars into financing conquests overseas, and well, you can expect the level of sympathy you’re going to meet with.
What’s next—buying your wheat from Canada, because the costs of your annual Monsanto seed licences are through the roof? Getting your books from our libraries because the latest amendment to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act included a “pay-by-the-word” reading tax?
You want cheaper drugs? Fix your patent laws.
You want a better health care system? Fix your priorities.
You don't want to do either?
Move to Canada.
Kjell Wooding
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
PD DCXXVI