Hiv activists protest over drug pricing policy

by Alina Lobzina at 19/07/2012

The Moscow News

 Russian HIV activists have accused pharmaceutical companies of cashing on vital medicines, focusing first on ViiV Healthcare, an HIV joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.

Members of patient union Patsientsky Kontrol gathered on Thursday morning outside ViiV’s Moscow office to protest over its pricing policy, saying that in other countries the same treatment costs many times less.

“We don’t deny the companies right to gain superprofit from selling their products, but it’s essential to make it possible for people to survive,” said Sergei Golovin, one of the protest organizers. 

Halving prices

Only half of Russia’s 200,000 people in need of HIV treatment receive it from the state, according to official estimates. About 50,000 people are prescribed drugs produced by ViiV Healthcare.

Since Russia has 90 percent of the growing epidemic in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to the UN’s AIDS program recent report, the situation will worsen in the next few years. Governmental statistics put the number of HIV-positive Russians at 650,000 people.

By 2015, 350,000 people will require the treatment, activists say, which is to cost the budget about 63 billion rubles ($1.9 billion). Currently, the state spends about 12 billion roubles on medicines for HIV treatment, but drug shortages are often reported from different parts of the country.

“We propose that they halve their prices and double their distribution,” Golovin said.

There are possibilities for lowering the price from its current level of $1,356 for a yearlong treatment session, he added. Last year’s annual Medecins Sans Frontieres drug pricing report suggested that lowest price for the company’s drugs around the world was $231.

More questions

ViiV’s representatives said by telephone they had not been warned about any visitors and that was why no one came out to the group of 15 people gathered outside of their office in central Moscow.

Evald Gherbst, government relations and external communications manager at GlaxoSmithKline Russia, said prices in Russia had been lowered by 66 percent.

“It is one of the lowest in Europe and is set at the level of Latin American countries,” he wrote in an e-mail. Comparing prices with the world’s poorest countries would be “incorrect,” he added.

Activists have questions about pricing for other pharmaceutical companies supplying drugs for HIV treatment in Russia.

“ViiV was just the first on our list,” Golovin said.

But there is at least one more party in the dispute. The Health Ministry’s press service did not reply to phone calls from The Moscow News, and activists said all most of their attempts to contact the ministry had failed.

“Last time I tried to do that, I ended up in a police station,” Andrei Skvortsov, who took part in Thursday’s protest, told The Moscow News.

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Demands to make drug use a criminal offence

by Evgeniya Chaykovskaya at 06/10/2011

The Moscow News

Russia’s drug control authorities have called for criminal punishment for “systematic drug use,” head of Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN) Sergei Yakovlev proposed on Wednesday.

The service plans a number of amendments to legislation including introducing criminal punishment or treatment as an alternative.

Drug users would face incarceration if he or she is caught a second time. First time offenders would pay a fine.

Yakovlev stressed that criminal punishment for drug use is “is not a goal in itself,” but would be an “additional legal mechanism to help people to stop taking drugs.”

Yakovlev did not specify how the offenders would be punished.

Return to Soviet system

FSKN is returning to the Soviet practice concerning drug use, when users would also be fined when caught for the first time, and were charged only after they were caught under the influence a second time. The maximum punishment was seven years in prison.

At the moment drug use in Russia is not a criminal offence, as opposed to drug dealing or possession.

Those caught under the influence face a 500-1,000 ruble fine or administrative arrest for up to 15 days.

But if the perpetrator goes to the doctors voluntarily and agrees to undergo a course of therapy, then they would not have to pay the fine.

Only purchase, possession, movement, production of drugs, persuading someone to take drugs, organizing and keeping drug dens, growing drug producing plants are criminal offences.

International experience

Drug addiction is listed as a disease by the World Health Organization and “criminal punishment for a disease in absolutely intolerable,” WHO expert Vladimir Mendelevich told Gazeta.ru.

He stressed that many developed countries were attempting to decriminalize drugs.

Denmark, German, Italy and Austria all have punishment for drug possession, but not use.

In the UK there has been a trend of decriminalizing drug use, but those caught in possession could get up to seven years in prison, depending on the class of drug and quantities. Supplying could lead to a life term.

Head of City Without Drugs fund Yevgeny Roisman argues that every country that is serious about fighting drug use – USA, China, Sweden and Japan -- introduced criminal punishment for drug use.

“The drug addict should have a choice – go to prison or get treatment. It is necessary to widely open the gates to medical and social rehabilitation. But at the moment there is no state rehabilitation at all,” Roisman told Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Florida recently introduced a bill denying drug-users state benefits, CNN reported. Applicants for state benefits will have to pay for the tests themselves, and if they pass, the money would be reimbursed.

A similar law was passed in Michigan in 2003, but was found unconstitutional as it was found to contradict to the fourth amendment which protects the nationals from unreasonable search.

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