R: Public health concerns justify government violation of pharmaceutical patents.

I affirm the resolution "Public health concerns justify government violation of pharmaceutical patents". I offer the following definitions: Pharmaceutical patent- a patent granted by the government referring to either pharmaceutical drugs or the related medical technology Government violation of pharmaceutical patents- government action whereby patents are infringed upon or revoked My value is Justice. We must use this value because the resolution clearly asks whether something is justified, that is to say, whether it is just. My criterion is Maximization of Life. We use this criterion because life all rights or any parts of life are irrelevant without it. Therefore Justice is impossible without it. Contention One: Government violation of pharmaceutical patents makes life-saving drugs more accessible to people. The price of drugs is as high as the companies set it for their own profit. If one company is the sole owner of a patent, then it has the ability to charge whatever price it wishes. Take for example the cancer drug Avastin. Avastin was released as a drug to treat advanced lung, breast, or colon cancer. It has been found to increase patient's time to live buy an average of 5 months and delays tumor growth by an average of 4 months. It costs up to $100,000 a year. Some drugs can be so expensive that people who literally cannot live without them either have no access to those medicines or must go into debt or utter poverty to get them. The impact is clear: Those who desperately need life-saving medicines are either unable to access these medicines at all or must may exorbitant amounts to procure them. Pharmaceutical patent violations by government lower the prices and maximize life by allowing greater access. Contention Two: Government pharmaceutical patent violation opens up potentially life-saving technologies that would otherwise be ignored. Pharmaceutical companies focus on the specific project they are working on, but in doing so they come upon new technologies which, although they may be unrelated to the current project, are still valuable to medicine, if not even more so than the project currently being worked on. However, although that company may have no present use for the technology, it still sets up patent thickets on it so that other companies cannot access the technology. Schacht explains: Innovators in biomedical industries tend to see patent protection as critically important as a way to prohibit competitors from appropriating the results of a company's research and development efforts. The express purpose of such patent thickets is to prevent technology from being accessed and used to develop potentially life-saving drugs by rival companies. Government violation of such patents would open up this technology to be used, maximizing life far more than by allowing it to wither in a scientists imagination. Contention Three: Government pharmaceutical patent violations allow the government to direct R&D towards technology which maximizes life. In a system where their patents are absolutely protected, pharmaceutical companies would naturally pursue those lines are research which are most lucrative, which they can make the most money off of. However, the most lucrative drugs are not necessarily the most beneficial to maximization of life. Patent violation naturally devalues whichever technology it releases. When the government has the ability to devalue a certain technology, drug companies will naturally not pursue that technology but rather invest in others which are now far more lucrative than the originals. The government then uses patent violation as a means to emphasize R&D which better maximizes life.