Volume 48, Number 12 · July 19, 2001
The Devil's Playground
By Hilary Mantel
The Constant Gardener
by John le Carré
Scribner, 492 pp., $28.00
On April 19 of this year, in South Africa, thirty-nine drug companies jointly withdrew from a lawsuit aimed at protecting their patents. The suit had been brought by the pharmaceutical giants in response to a law passed in 1997, which allowed the South African health ministry to buy copies of branded drugs; the law gave the go-ahead to local and foreign manufacturers to ignore patents and sell generic copies at a price local markets could bear. The withdrawal of the pharmaceutical companies' action was a significant moral victory for the South African administration, which governs a population in which deaths from AIDS are said to run at five thousand a week.
Review, 4977 words
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