Ira Grupper irag@iglou.com
LABOR PAEANS— September, 2010
Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )
Health Care or Wealth Care – The Story of One Medicine
This column will concentrate on how drug companies help us, or, rather, themselves. But first we must make a correction.
The massive protest rally being put together by the NAACP and organized labor will be October 2 in Washington DC. I gave the wrong date in the last column.
It is being organized by One Nation Working Together, a broad-based coalition. This march has precedent. In 1941 A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin began to organize a march on Washington to protest against race discrimination in the defense industries. They issued a "Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense on July, 1, 1941".
President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to get Randolph and Rustin to cancel the demonstration, saying it would hurt the struggle against fascism (we didn’t actually enter WW II until December). Their steadfastness forced FDR to issue Executive Order 8802, barring discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus (the Fair Employment Act). Randolph then called off his proposed march.
Such a march, given seeming unending unemployment for all races, is needed now, sixty nine years later. As of this writing, the Kentucky organizations planning to rent buses to go to Washington DC are the NAACP, United Food and Commercial Workers, and the KY State AFL-CIO. KY Jobs With Justice is also mobilizing.
All over the United States there are millions of people out of work, losing homes, unable to support their families. Cong. John Conyers (D-Michigan) is pushing a jobs bill: “The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act.” More about this in our October column.
When you are unemployed/underemployed you turn to your safety nets, the most important being Social Security. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) writes (August 14): “For 75 years, Social Security has... been a sacred promise to millions of Americans.” No longer, however, will future retirees get benefits at age 65—they’ll have to wait.
The AARP reported earlier, on June 29: “The number of doctors refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payment rates is setting a new high, just six months before millions of Baby Boomers begin enrolling in the government health care program.”
Why does our government permit this? Maybe for the same reason it is allowing a drug company to gain a market lock on the drug colchicine.
Colchicine was used originally, and still is used, to treat rheumatic complaints, especially gout, and other conditions. It is also being investigated for its use as an anticancer drug. Gout is excruciatingly painful, caused by elevated levels of uric acid in the blood, which crystallize and are deposited in joints, tendons, and surrounding tissues.
On July 29, 2009 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved colchicine as a monotherapy, and gave seven-year marketing exclusivity to one drug company, URL Pharma, in exchange for URL Pharma doing two new studies. URL Pharma then raised the price from $0.09 per pill to $4.85, and sued to remove other versions from the market.
Colchicine is an ancient drug. Colchicum, the precursor of colchicine, was described for treatment of rheumatism and swelling in the Ebers Papyrus, about 1500 B.C. The use of Colchicum corm for gout probably traces back to ca. 550 A.D. Colchicum extract was first described as a treatment for gout in De Materia Medica by Pedanius Dioscorides in the first century CE.
Colchicum corm was used by Persian physician Ibn Sina, and other Islamic physicians, was recommended by Ambroise Pare in the sixteenth century, and appeared in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1618.
It was first isolated in 1820 by two French chemists. In 1833 P.L. Geiger purified an active ingredient, which he named colchicine. Colchicum was brought to America, from France, by Benjamin Franklin. Additionally, Colchicine, it is said, is "used widely," and off-label by naturopaths for a number of treatments, including the treatment of back pain.
So, colchicine is an ancient treatment. Well, comes now modern capitalism and the profit motive, with the Australian biotechnology company Giaconda, the British drug development company Angiogene, our very own URL Pharma, and others, all wanting a piece of the financial action generated by patient pain.
As a drug predating the FDA, colchicine was sold as a generic in the United States for many years. Yet, in August 2009, colchicine won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in the United States as a stand-alone drug for the treatment of acute flares of gout and familial Mediterranean fever. It awarded Colcrys (the brand name of Colchicine made by URL Pharma) a three-year term of market exclusivity, PROHIBITING generic sales.
URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per pill to $4.85, and sued to remove other versions from market. This, some feel, will increase costs to state Medicaid programs from $1 million to $50 million.
A March 18 memo from the American College of Rheumatology reports: “The ACR has been in contact with the FDA and URL Pharma to address the increase in cost of the drug Colchicine.” Read the June issue of Rheumatology News: “As URL Pharma Inc. and other drug companies battle in court over access to the U.S. colchicine market, the supply of unapproved colchicine is beginning to decline.”
In a January 2010 editorial in Rheumatology News, Dr. Edward Fudman writes: “The price of colchicine (will increase) by 50-fold…unless rheumatologists and patients can convince the Food and Drug Administration to allow the colchicines made by generic manufacturers to stay on the market.”
Remember: colchicine eases the excruciating pain of gout. Because of the impending colchicine shortage, and the increase in price (from nine cents to almost five dollars per pill), will the excruciating suffering of patients be eased, or will one drug company gouge profit from the anticipated pain of masses of people?
Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com