eoe-0605-018 aatomsmith's comment about 6/27 goldberg article & my response

(LOS ANGELES, POSTED JUNE 29, 2005)

comment posted on aatombomb blog by aatomsmith

posted june 29, 2005 03:52pm

"it’s a shame you aren’t hiv-infected yourself. you would probably change your attitude from that of what malcolm x called a ‘house negro’ to something a teeny bit more progressive."

be careful about assuming things that provide convenient rhetorical flourish, richard. i didn't move over to the dark side of libertarian/hawkish politics until long after i tested positive, and i am a dedicated free market advocate that believes that patent infringement is a very real problem for the pharmacological industry. i fear your logic, passionate and well-meaning as it is, is extremely short-sighted. in a world where hiv funding is already at dangerously low levels, to cut off the profit margin of big pharm r&d budgets would be medical suicide for the positive community. do you know how many life-prolonging aids meds have come from countries that have socialized medicine? my guess would be zero.

my response

posted june 29, 2005 10:21pm on aatombomb

aatom--

i'm going to try and shoot from the hip in response to what you say rather than chew on it for a while and give you a tidy piece of prose. i feel an urgency about this--and a passion, which you spotted--that i want to honor.

first off, thanks.

i agree with you. "patent infringement is a very real problem for the pharmacological industry." i think i understand something different than you do from that statement.

if i am a healer, is my purpose to heal or to make a buck? we are in a situation where these two motives collide with one another. they have become mutually exclusive options. to withhold healing until i make a buck turns me into a pirate or a terrorist or a gangster or a banker or some other kind of villain. it denies my own nature and keeps healing from the sick. duh.

so i don't agree that the letter was a "convenient rhetorical flourish." i thought about it a long time. you can follow the development of it on eoe. (here's what malcolm x said, in part:

"if the master's house caught on fire, the house negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. if the master got sick, the house negro would say, ‘what's the matter, boss, we sick?’ we sick! he identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. and if you came to the house negro and said, ‘let's run away, let's escape, let's separate,’ the house negro would look at you and say,‘man, you crazy. what you mean, separate? where is there a better house than this? where can I wear better clothes than this? where can I eat better food than this?’ that was that house negro. in those days he was called a ‘house nigger.’ and that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here."

frankly, i thought the tone of goldberg's article was vary house-niggerish, in what would be malcolm x's parlance. i hear in the tone of his article some very dark and disturbing possibilities. )

but let's look at it from another angle.

i recall a blog from a reporter covering the flu epidemic last year in eastern asia with a "doctors without borders" team. i will find the site for you later--it's a pretty interesting account. at the end of it all, she muses something along these lines: when the military wants a new battleship, they don't wave around incentives and hope that battleship builders will come up with something nifty that they can test drive. the military spells out their specifications to the ship builders, and the two agree on funding. the battleship is built and delivered. so why do we handle the development and production of vaccines with only economic incentives?

here's another clip that i have right in front of me because i've been trying to respond to it for a while. it's from an article on the gates foundation by frank greeve at the charlotte, nc observer, published may 22, 2005: "the basic problem is that vaccines, which typically offer long-term immunity from one battery of shots, aren't nearly as profitable as drugs that are taken daily. pfizer's cholesterol-lowering lipitor, for example, with $10 billion in global sales, grosses more than all the world's vaccines combined."

so the very nature of a free market is in conflict with the needs of its consumers. the marketees.

i think the issue comes down to this: how do we mean to lead our lives? how do we intend to lead our lives? how must we lead our lives? or are motive and theme to be considered mere afterthoughts, something to think idly about when we're not so busy making money and paying bills?

to me it also comes down to a question of personal political activism: as mlking said about the good samaritan, the important consideration isn't "what will happen if i respond to the goldberg article?" but rather, "what will happen if i don't?" i think personal political activism is a spiritual and meditative discipline.

so i think my logic, by which you mean my reasoning, is not short-sighted but very long-sighted. at least that's what my intent is.

how would you go about tackling the issues i'm talking about? how would you go about expeditiously developing and distributing an aids vaccine worldwide? in under a year? just wait with our fingers crossed and hope there's something to test drive eventually? how are we to honor the intellectual greatness of the artificer--what is arguably a spiritual greatness also--in a way that does not impoverish or marginalize the existence of the recipient? and what else do we do to continue to lead life after the aids epidemic is over? what would be the spiritual impact of that victory? how would you recommend harnessing it?

you are a darkside libertarian hawk as well as a dedicated free market advocate. i am an aids shaman. we are both aristotilianly(!) political animals. in theory, from the same planet.

what a joy it has been to begin a conversation with you. namaste.

ps--"do you know how many life-prolonging aids meds have come from countries that have socialized medicine? my guess would be zero." i think the question is irrelevant, but i didn't want you to think i had skipped over it. pharmaceutical medicines are cultural artifacts. how many western nations make really great hand-crafted fishing nets any more? have you ever eaten snow and fish oil? i know a bunch of cultural communities that make life more livable for the ill than we do. our culture treats the disease. other cultures treat the sick (by which i mean the patient). but we are in the midst of a huge global cultural exchange, and i hope it leads eventually to a global and pluralistic congress of cultural communities. i can define that better for you some other time. it sounds a bit dewey-eyed at the moment.

one more quick point i missed: "to cut off the profit margin of big pharm r&d budgets would be medical suicide for the positive community." how is that different from what we've got now? doesn't the taking of too much profit also limit the amount of r&d budgets? what is a reasonable profit? whatever you can carry away? how can it be honestly and fairly determined without screwing around with accountancy tricks? and what difference do the big pharma r&d budgets make if they lie about the results anyway?

i think i'll copy these posts to eoe.

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