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What has been the impact of these provisions under NAFTA? In 1998, an Ohio-based hazardous waste disposal company won a suit for $20 million against Canada for expropriation of its business due to a Canadian ban on the import of PCBs, a highly toxic coolant used in electrical transformers. The same year, another U.S. corporation filed suit against Canada, claiming a law passed by the Canadian Parliament (which had banned the use of the gasoline additive and potentially harmful neurotoxin MMT) was a “measure tantamount to expropriation.” The Canadian government, hearing that...
...power of the Treatment Action Group's international networking became clear late in 1999, when ACT-UP protesters began dogging then-vice president Al Gore on the campaign trail to demand that the White House withdraw the threat of sanctions against South Africa in retaliation for any importing of generic AIDS drugs. The pressure worked - President Clinton issued an executive order to that effect, which President Bush has allowed to stand. After all, what politician wants to be seen standing up for intellectual property rights (and profits) in a situation where they may keep life-saving drugs...
...Thailand, returning with a suitcase full of Biozole, a locally manufactured generic copy of Fluconazole - a drug used to treat opportunistic infections in AIDS patients - that he bought at a price 98 percent cheaper than the price charged in South Africa for the brand-name tablets. This illegal "import" was a symbolic act of defiance, designed to challenge the drug companies and stiffen the spine of his own government. "People were dying across the country and doctors were saying they could not afford to prescribe the right medicines," Achmat told an interviewer. "We wanted to set a moral example...
...sure, governments facing AIDS crises throughout the developing world have followed the South Africa case with interest, and will be encouraged by its outcome. Although sales to Africa, for example, count for some 1 percent of the market of AIDS-drugs manufacturers, the corporations fear that allowing the import of generic versions in those markets could lead to challenges elsewhere: Black market sales in Western markets, for example, or even direct challenges by infected communities in the industrialized world questioning why they're being asked to pay $15,000 a year for anti-retroviral treatments available elsewhere...
...dilemma for the government that won the suit. The resistance of the drug companies had given the government of President Thabo Mbeki a ready explanation for its failure to make anti-retrovirals available to South Africa's infected population. But even at the substantially lower prices made possible by importing generic versions, a mass treatment campaign would be a mammoth expense to the cash-strapped government. Simply providing the medical infrastructure to supply the drugs to some 5 million people, many of whom live in conditions of abject poverty that increase their vulnerability to all manner of infection could require...