My friend James Schneider wants to abolish patents on drugs. Drugs are of course extremly expensive to develop. It is not only the biological and chemical research needed to develop molecules acting as drugs which makes this so expensive, but also the research required to modify these molecules meet the safety standards for regulatory approval. And these safety standard are constantly rising; in fact many key drugs currently sold such as aspirin would not get approved these days. For many if not most drugs it is comparatively easy to produce them once these hurdles are cleared. Virtually anybody could produce them if not for the patent protection. Surely, abolishing patents would destroy a huge incentive to invest into the risky, but socially tremendously valuable field of pharmaceutical research and development.

Being HIV positive was considered a death sentence in the early 90s, by the late 90s HIV/Aids has become a chronic disease in the Western World . Both nonprofit/ commercial research were key for this medical breakthrough to happen. I would argue that it would be morally abhorrent to slow down the pace of the pharmaceutical research by tinkering with the regulatory framework.