Commentary
Nevada lawmakers support
attack on scientific researchers
By Steven Miller
Nevada’s lawmakers are nice
people.
They would never walk into
your house and—say—grab your stereo without permission and run
down the street with it.
They also—we can be
relatively sure—wouldn’t encourage other Nevadans to do
so.
On the other hand, what if
your property wasn’t physical, but intellectual? What
if you’d written and copyrighted some software? A story? A
song?
What if you were, say,
Nevada’s Altair Nanotechnologies, and after years of research
you’d achieved patents on ground-breaking new processes that
helped clients like Nevada’s Titanium Metal Corporation
produce its namesake metal more cost effectively? And helped
other clients do environmental remediation, make better solar
cells, or produce better pharmaceuticals?
Would Nevada lawmakers
respect your intellectual property rights?
Maybe. Maybe not. It
apparently all depends on whether attacking your patent or
copyright protections might titillate enough thoughtless
voters.
Currently, 52 of Nevada’s
63 state lawmakers are listed as official co-sponsors on a
bill that explicitly assaults the patent protections and
intellectual property rights of American
companies—specifically, pharmaceutical firms. Assembly
Majority Leader Barbara Buckley is lead sponsor of AB 195,
which would violate U.S. law protecting the research patents
behind brand-name prescription drugs. The bill would
facilitate the unlawful mass importation of such drugs from
Canada, where they are subjected to Canadian government price
controls and only marginally profitable to their
manufacturers.
The bill’s own preface
acknowledges that the reimportation it would facilitate is an
explicit violation of federal law: “Existing law prohibits a
person from filling a prescription drug via the Internet if
the drug has not been lawfully imported into the United
States, or if the prescription was not delivered to a person
in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws.” The
U.S. laws referred to, of course, are designed to protect
American patent-holders from reimportation.
A March 17 report of
the Las Vegas Review-Journal said that AB 195 “calls
for the Nevada Office of Consumer Health Assistance to go to
Canada, check out pharmacies and license those that meet
Nevada standards. The agency would set up a Web site that
would make it easy for citizens to find qualified pharmacies
that could fill their prescriptions.”
Some officials said “they might
be able to license pharmacies within two weeks or three weeks
after the bill becomes law.”
Such remarks raise real
questions about just how serious Assembly Bill 195 really is.
Canada, of course, is a
sovereign nation. State of Nevada bureaucrats sent there to
“check out pharmacies” would lack any legal power to actually
independently determine which of them might “meet Nevada
standards.” In Canada, Nevada officials would lack any ability
to compel witnesses, demand government records, or otherwise
conduct any meaningful licensing inquiry. Perhaps they might
wander around in few north-of-the-borders drug marts,
evaluating staff friendliness and the décor. The authors of AB
195 and their votaries in the state bureaucracy seem to
believe that would suffice.
Nevertheless, a real issue
of safety does exist. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
has been vocal in its concern over the safety of imported
drugs, and—significantly—Canada, the “Canadian pharmacies” on
the Internet, and the states and localities that allow
importation all disclaim any responsibility for the safety of
such drugs.
Apparently, that’s with
good reason. An independent fact-finding mission at Kennedy
Airport in New York found that of the 40,000 packages arriving
there daily and believed to be carrying drugs, less than 700
were inspected. Yet in many of those the drugs were found to
be past their expiration dates or improperly packaged—calling
into question their effectiveness, and highlighting the risks
of tampering.
Notwithstanding the
dullness Nevada lawmakers currently demonstrate on the
protection of intellectual property, that protection is vital
to the Silver State economy. For example, the gaming
technology innovations of International Game Technology (IGT),
one of the few Fortune 500 companies in the Reno area, are so
critical to the firm’s future that it has an in-house
intellectual property department, just to oversee patent
issues.
Indeed, the entire U.S.
economy is highly dependent on intellectual property
protections. Economist John Howkins, writing in his book,
The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas,
points out that in 1999, $545 billion was spent worldwide on
research and development. Of that the U.S. share was $243
billion, or 44.6 percent. That explains why, of the world’s
total creative out-put just that year—including science,
research, entertainment, fashion, software, etc.—the U.S.
produced a $960-billion share, or 42.8 percent.
It was America’s Founding
Fathers—most especially Jefferson and Madison—who wrote the
protection of intellectual property into the U.S.
Constitution. They so wanted to ensure that inventors and
authors had an incentive to create that our founding charter
gives Congress the authority “To promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to
Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries.”
Now, politicians in Nevada
and other states seek to rob America’s “Authors and Inventors”
of precisely those basic rights.
This undermines Nevada’s
future. It undermines America’s. And it is appalling.
Steven Miller is
policy director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
