The monopoly that patents can create allows the intellectual property owner to have price control on the market.   Pharmaceutical companies claim their pricing is necessary to recoup the cost of research, development, and marketing and turn a profit although critics complain that the bulk of the research used at present by drug companies is that done by public agencies (costing them nothing).   According to 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 being 3.3%.  Many people all over the world are unable to afford the medicines that they need as an indirect result of intellectual property protection. Specifically the impoverished and elderly often are forced to make difficult choices about medical care and other necessities.   These monopolies allow prices to be set at whatever the market will allow, and in fact, differ given the location (as the elderly citizens of the U.S. realized when they began their trips to Canada to purchase their medicines).  Some consumers turn to copy-cat drugs which can sometimes be dangerous because the quality is unknown. Some consumers, however, are fighting back.  The senior citizens organized in Maine accusing drug companies of price gouging and compelled lawmakers in their state to enact legislation to force the drug companies make prices commensurate with those in other developing countries (e.g. Canada and Japan).  Although pharmaceutical companies fought back, entangling the law in the courts, Maine Rx was eventually enacted.  Patients over profit, as the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the World Health Assembly at Geneva in May 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."