Pharmanomics by Nick Dearden

Author:Nick Dearden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

5

Recolonising the Global Economy

At the heart of Big Pharma’s power lie its monopolies, which are based on a set of intellectual property rules. These rules have underscored Big Pharma’s transformation from a useful industry that researches important medicines into the financialised sector we see today. The story of how these rules came into being is important, because it explains so much about the nature of the global economy as a whole, and how big business came to have such enormous power over our lives. Few activists in the People’s Vaccine movement understand these intellectual property rules as well as Tahir Amin.

Amin could have made a lot of money from his 1990s legal training, centred on intellectual property, if his conscience had not led him down a different path. Amin is proud of his working-class background, and living for fifteen years in New York does not seem to have made much of a dent in his Yorkshire accent. I met him in perhaps London’s most famous bookshop, Foyles, and we reminisced about studying in the city in the 1990s.1 Back then, Foyles was a ramshackle place with countless small rooms, corridors and staircases, run by the eccentric and reputedly autocratic Christina Foyle. You could spend days getting lost in there, because books were arranged by publisher with no electronic database. Finding the book you needed was a matter of pure luck. On the other hand, finding a multitude of books that deeply interested you as you tried to locate what you needed was guaranteed. Today, the shop is a neat and spacious place. It’s a lot less fun, but you can find what you are looking for with ease.

To me it feels like a metaphor for London itself, which has lost so much of what made it unique and interesting, though it has certainly become an easier city to live in for those with a high enough income. The liberalisation of the City of London in the 1980s and ’90s created incredible wealth, London becoming the pre-eminent home of the greed-is-good ‘Yuppie’ class. But it was also the home of some of the biggest ecstasy-fuelled rave clubs in the world, of squat culture, and of enormous, creative demonstrations against the rapid gentrification of the city.

It was a city at a crossroads. Margaret Thatcher had gone, but her legacy was all around us. Before Thatcher, Britain was one of the most equal and left-leaning countries in Europe. This was anathema to Thatcher, who famously insisted, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ The vision which drove Thatcher on, a set of ideas which would congeal into something called neoliberalism, would affect not only Britain but the entire global economy. These neoliberal ideas were at the heart of the reshaping the pharmaceutical industry into the beast that I was discussing with Amin.

But in the early nineties, when Amin and I were studying, the implications of all of this for the rest of the world were not so obvious. As a student activist, I was interested in domestic struggles, such as opposing privatisation and Britain’s far right.

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