Topic: Insuring Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals
Country: Canada
Delegate Name: Connor Renckly
School: Fishers High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Canada position papers GLIMUN 2012 committees
Over the past century mankind has witnessed extraordinary advances in the field of medicine, unfortunately these advances don’t always reach those that need them most.
The incredibly high price of Pharmaceuticals in today’s global market makes it almost impossible for some people to access the medicine that they so desperately need. The main problem we face is how to get these people their medicine without denying the medical companies of their right to a free market. Canada has hopes that we can come up with a solution to this problem that both satisfies the public’s need for cheaper pharmaceuticals and remains economically just.
The main thing we need to consider is the repercussions of individuals not having access to decently priced pharmaceuticals, one of the main reasons this issue is a global concern is people in desperation turning to risky counterfeit drugs. The issue of counterfeit drugs could be dealt with in a relatively simple fashion, we simply need to release dummy counterfeit drugs onto the market and track where their progression. If done properly this could help us identify the “Middle-Men” between the makers of hazardous counterfeit drugs and the consumers. It would then be rather easy to find the producers of the counterfeit drugs in question.
Unfortunately it will be much harder to deal with the high prices of legitimate Pharmaceuticals, in many cases the need for the medicine is so high that the purchases will pay ludicrous amounts of money for it. As it is, prices won’t be going down anytime soon unless the U.N. intervenes. The problem with any proposed plan would be the violation of a company’s patents, we could easily make dummy corporations with cheaply priced medicine but it would violate a pharmaceutical company’s right to the “First move advantage” that their patent earned them. There are many different proposed solutions to this problem, like shortening the lifespan of a patent, but we need to determine what is fair on both sides before we decide what to do.
Canada enters this conference hoping to find a solution to this troubling problem. While we are not certain of what to do in this area we will openly listen to the opinions of all the other counties present. The United Nations needs to make a solution that can provide people with the medicine they need while remaining “Ethically sound”. Canada will contribute what we can to help solve this problem and we would like to ask that other countries present to do the same.
