The 1AC’s orientation to patents is one of market fundamentalism – their abject respect for IP rights collapses the health of the global south to line the pockets of pharma execs
19 – Amy Kapczynski is professor of law at Yale Law School, faculty co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and co-founder of the Law and Political Economy Blog.
Amy Kapczynski, April 26 2019, “THE RIGHT TO MEDICINES IN AN AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM,” Humanity, http://humanityjournal.org/issue10-1/the-right-to-medicines-in-an-age-of-neoliberalism/
So far, the debate over judicialization has failed to engage a foundational aspect of the right to medicines cases: the political economy of medicines that they assume. These cases operate against a background of market ordering and private property rights that they typically neither see nor disturb. It is anchored by a World Trade Organization treaty that has helped reshape national law, particularly in the global South, requiring all members to adopt intellectual property laws similar to those prevailing in the North, and to offer patents on life-saving medicines. These patents—monopoly rights that are granted by states and enforced by courts—and not manufacturing costs are the overwhelming determinant of the budgetary implications of the right to medicines. The prevailing political economy in fact, as I will explain, structurally undermines equity, increasing prices without generating significant countervailing innovation to meet the needs of the global poor.
As Quinn Slobodian has described, neoliberalism mandates not the destruction of the state but the construction of a particular form of governance that protects capital from democratic demands for social justice and redistribution.24 Here we have a signal example: a set of international legal rules and sanctions that requires states to protect a form of property that prioritizes the profit imperative over access to essential goods, and that generates net wealth transfers to multinational companies based in the global North.