May 9, 2007 1:07 PM

Hey Bill, What About When You Were President?

I'm really happy to read that former President Bill Clinton is helping to lower prices for life-saving drugs in the developing world, and that his efforts are an attempt to help allow developing countries break restrictive patents in order to produce much-needed AIDS medicine. This follows an earlier New York Times story noting:

"The generics question has also opened a rift in the United States, between Bush and former President Bill Clinton. On a recent visit to New Delhi, Clinton said he had confronted Bush about generics while flying to Rome for the papal funeral last April. 'The American position is untenable,' Clinton recalled saying. In an interview, Clinton said Washington was succumbing to the influence of the drug lobby in undermining the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or Trips."

There's just one thing I don't understand. If Clinton is now trying to lower prices and advocating the breaking of patents because the U.S. government's position is "untenable," how come he himself actually helped create the situation in the first place? Here's Dean Baker explaining what I'm talking about:

"Clinton was the person who allowed the pharmaceutical industry to use the power of the U.S. trade office to get the TRIPS provisions into the 1995 Uruguay Round agreement of the W.T.O. These provisions will limit the access to generic drugs for billions of people in the developing world, in some cases raising the price of AIDS drugs by several thousand percent. Even in his last years in office, Clinton harassed the South African government over its efforts to issue compulsory licenses for drugs used to treat AIDS victims. He didn’t back down until protestors associated with ACT-UP began trailing Al Gore at his campaign events."

So again, while I'm happy Clinton is working hard to bring down AIDS medicine prices, I think he owes the world a little explanation as to why he helped create the situation he now correctly says is such a problem, and perhaps a little pushback on former top level members of his administration like Bob Rubin who continue to say such patent protections should be included in trade deals, while labor, human rights and environmental protections should not.