Patents create a kind of monopoly, allowing the intellectual property owner to have leveraged price control over a given market.   Pharmaceutical companies claim their pricing is necessary to recoup their research, development, and marketing costs, and turn a profit.  Critics counter that the bulk of the research currently benefiting drug companies is done by public agencies, costing them nothing.   According to a 2003 interview with Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School, "the 10 drug companies on the Fortune 500 list last year took in net profits of 18.5 percent on sales."  The average of other industries was 3.3%.   As an indirect result of intellectual property protection, many people throughout the world are unable to afford the medicines they need.  The impoverished and elderly are most likely to be compromised by IP laws into difficult choices about medical care and other necessities.   These monopolies allow prices to be set at whatever price the market will allow, forcing many elderly citizens of the U.S. to travel to Canada, where regulation keeps the cost of medicines low.   Some consumers, however, are fighting back.  Senior citizens organized in Maine, accusing drug companies of price gouging. Protestors compelled state lawmakers to enact legislation that forced drug companies to set prices comparable to those in other developing countries.  Although pharmaceutical companies fought back, entangling the law in the courts, Maine Rx was eventually enacted.  IP critics argue that we must prioritize patients over profit.  Some consumers turn to counterfeit drugs, which are potentially dangeous because of dubious, unregulated quality (see Tolomeo’s Story).  As the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the World Health Assembly at Geneva in 1982: "The idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death."

Source: 2002 Drug Industry Profits: Hefty Pharmaceutical Company
Margins Dwarf other Industries, June, 2003, page 4