Cheap, fast, and generic, the U.S. wants Cipro. Anthrax could become a national emergency, the argument goes, and we'll need to make sure we have enough of the antibiotic to go around. And forget patent law, we need to have as many manufacturers as possible making this life saving drug now.
Bayer AG, the current manufacturer and patent holder of Cipro, charges $1.80 a pill for the medication (a course of treatment is two pills a day for sixty days). We need to produce a cheaper generic to ensure that we can afford enough to go around.

U.S. senator Charles Schumer, long an outspoken advocate for removing restrictions on generic drugs, asserted in a press conference Tuesday his belief that the federal government has the authority to overrule pharmaceutical patents in times of crisis. The Department of Health and
Human Services has cautioned against rushing to violate patent law right now, but said that they are prepared to begin manufacturing if current supplies run out. Such a move seems like a logical response to a potential health crisis.

Consider this: since the scare began one week ago, anthrax has killed one person in the United States. In the same period, 42,000 people died of AIDS in Africa. International patent laws prohibit manufacturing inexpensive generic versions of the drugs that have changed the face of AIDS in America, meaning that most people in the world are denied access to them. As their citizens die by the thousands, the governments of South Africa, Brazil, and other countries have had to sue or continually threaten to sue pharmaceutical companies merely to win a reduction in
price of these needlessly expensive life saving medications. Such price reductions do not necessarily increase access to treatment; if $4 a day for sixty days is deemed too expensive for Cipro here, an AIDS drug reduced from $16 to $2 a day for a lifetime is still prohibitively
expensive in a country like Kenya, where the average day's pay is less than one dollar.

Many of these pharmaceutical companies are U.S.-based corporations, and yet no one in the government seems concerned enough about AIDS to overrule patent law and provide for free drugs that could have saved the parents of the over 12 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Last year,
the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act became law after wording that would have allowed generic AIDS drugs was dropped in Congress. According to ACT UP, pharmaceutical lobbying resulted in the provision being stripped from the bill. Ironically, the same legislative body that is
now seriously considering manufacturing generic ciprofloxacin overwhelmingly voted to pass a revised Africa law prohibiting the very actions we today deem necessary here.

Among the dubious--and comfortless--benefits of tragedy, perhaps most often cited is an increase of compassion and empathy for others. Rarely is the U.S. as a country, and its government in particular, put in a position even approaching that of many of the people routinely made to suffer in the name of "free trade" and profit. It might be too much to expect that the pain felt here now will engender understanding of what others around the world have felt for years as a result of U.S. imperialism and corporate profiteering. However, we can't allow grief and "unity" to stop us from making those connections.