By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Mar 20 2007 (IPS)

A broad coalition of Thai non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is threatening to tap the spirit of nationalism, which runs deep and wide here, in a showdown with a Chicago-based pharmaceutical giant. The need for access to cheaper life-saving drugs has sparked this row.

The street outside the Thailand office of Abbott Laboratories in a popular shopping area in downtown Bangkok is poised to become one of the many battlegrounds in this imminent clash. Other sites the NGOs have in mind are shops that sell Abbott products, advertising agencies and Thai customers.

‘’Abbott does not care about Thai people. We call on Thai people to boycott all Abbott products,” Saree Aongsomwang, manager of the Foundation for Consumers, said this week. ‘’We have to stand up to Abbott.”

Her call was echoed by Rosana Tositrakul, a member of the Thai Holistic Health Foundation, who compared support for Abbott as equal to ‘’supporting a fox in a chicken coop.” ‘’Thai consumers must get together and boycott Abbott, because it is an effective tool,” she said. ‘’This resistance from small people will continue until Abbott changes its policies. This action will be an awakening of Thai people.”

The show of defiance directed at Abbott has grown since the pharma giant declared last week that it would not be marketing new drugs to Thailand as a protest against a decision by Bangkok’s military-appointed government to invoke a clause in the global trading rules. In January, health minister Mongkol na Songkhla confirmed that Thailand had used the ‘compulsory license’ option recognised by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to break the patent on ‘Kaletra’, an anti-retroviral (ARV) drug produced by Abbott.

Abbott’s announcement on Mar. 14 that it will not register seven new drugs in Thailand include a new ARV pill conducive to tropical climates in addition to an antibiotic, a painkiller and drugs for kidney disease and blood clots. The multinational has defended its move by seeking recourse in a familiar argument: that breaking patents the Thai way will undermine the efforts by pharmaceutical companies to invest in research and development for new drugs.

‘’It is the first time that a pharmaceutical company has gone so far. I don’t see what they are trying to achieve through these threats,” Paul Cawthorn, from MSF’s Bangkok office, told IPS. ‘’What they have done is very petty and appalling. It will reflect badly on multinational companies.”

Abbott’s decision has ‘’raised the ante” in the campaign for cheaper drugs in the developing world to ‘’a new level,” he added. ‘’We are talking about essential, life saving medicines. This issue is not going to go away, because access to drugs has become a critical issue.”

In fact, the position taken by Thai authorities to justify the use of the WTO-approved compulsory license, in the case of public health emergencies, is revealing. ‘’The Thai ministry of public health views these decisions on the government use of patents as a form of social movement that aims at improving access to essential medicines and the health of the people,” minister Mongkol wrote in a preface to a book on Thailand’s position towards compulsory license: ‘’The public health interest is thus the main and final goal of this social movement.”

The Thai health ministry believes in ‘’a moderate and public interest oriented approach to implement the intellectual property right,” added the 96-page book, which was released this month in Geneva where the World Health Organisation (WHO) is based. ‘’We are convinced and committed to the view that Public Health interest and the life of the people must come before commercial interest.”

Abbott has also to contend with the lack of support from two other pharmaceutical giants who have been equally affected by Bangkok’s invoking the compulsory license option to break their respective patent-protected drugs. Neither the pharma giant Sanofi-Aventis, which produces Palvix, a drug for heart patients, nor Merck, which produces Efavirenz, a life-prolonging drug for HIV patients, has turned on Thailand the way Abbott has.

Merck was the first to be hit by the new public health policy of this South-east Asian nation in November last year, followed by Abbott and Sanofi-Aventis in January. The right of a developing country to issue a compulsory license, to break a patent-protected drug and produce a cheaper generic version locally, was one of two provisions that were approved during the WTO ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, in 2001. The other was to enable developing countries faced with public health emergencies the right to break patents by importing cheaper copycat versions.

Thai activists who are gearing up to mount the boycott of Abbott products here say that studies justify Bangkok’s decision to break the patents on expensive anti-AIDS drugs desperately in need. According to official reports, the public health budget for ARVs has increased from 10 million US dollars in 2001 to over 100 million dollars this year. And even that figure will only buy drugs for the 82,000 patients out of the country’s 500,000 infected.

‘’The ministry of health must stand firm on its decision,” says Nimitr Tien-udom, head of AIDS Access, an NGO working to secure cheaper drugs for people with HIV. ‘’If you are using Abbott’s products just stop. The company’s tactic is to monopolise patients in the market.”

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