Trade in Fake Medicines Is Impossible to Stop Without Globalized Laws and Governance

There is widespread recognition that poor quality medicines endanger public safety, and in the worst cases, kill patients.  Yet despite energetic WHO leadership, countries have been unable to reach stable agreement on even basic principles to guide international action on the twin challenges of safeguarding the quality of genuine medicines, and criminalizing falsified medicines.  Progress has been held back unnecessarily by controversy over intellectual property rights, imprecision and confusion in defining key terms, and an overall dearth of vision on devising an international governance framework to improve medicine quality.  In this talk, I will argue that the medical problem of poor quality medicines is actualy a problem of international law and diplomacy, which lack a precise definition of the problem, and which therefore have not yet put in place the legal measures to prohibit the international trade in bad quality medicines: i.e. the bad medicines are globalized along with the good ones.  I will explain, as a scientist and a lawyer, how this gap can be filed through a new global treaty.