The scrapping, at the instance of the Malacañang, of the “generics-only” clause in the cheap medicines bill sadly proclaims the triumph of vested interests.

First, the powerful pharmaceutical companies that make and sell the more expensive branded drugs, definitely, left no stone unturned to preserve the primacy of their products over the generics in the market place. Second, it is already too open a secret that practicing physicians do regularly receive various forms of perks from drug establishments in exchange for promoting and advertising the latter’s brand names in every prescription they write. Why, indeed, would they allow such “unholy alliance” to suddenly break up?

The doctors’ argument that the generics-only clause puts patients at the sole mercy of the drugstore sales clerk—swallowed hook, line and sinker by senators and by the originally disagreeing congressmen upon Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s behest—is downright misleading, hypocritical and self-serving.

That is especially so because there is an existing law that specifically requires every drugstore to have a licensed pharmacist who can interpret and dispense doctors’ prescriptions. It’s unfortunate that this law is now widely violated with open immunity; the more, alas, would it surely be, as doctors, having got what they wanted, would now continue to take pharmacists for granted, thus ensuring the already too ostensible gradual extinction, in these parts, of pharmacy as a profession. I only wish for those good old days when doctors and pharmacists were truly inseparable partners in caring for the sick.

That Arroyo herself has admitted that the cheap medicines bill is imperfect or below the ideal without the generics-only clause ironically demonstrates our lawmakers’ “puede-na” [good enough] mind-set in crafting laws. In the issue at hand, this would be pardonable if the imperfection had not been foreseen; but it is idiotic because it was known and curtly ignored for political convenience.

Generic drugs are, to the masses, far more affordable than the branded ones; and neither are they necessarily less effective. Otherwise, the Food and Drug Administration itself can be accused of being remiss in safeguarding the nation’s health against unscrupulous drug manufacturers, or that those who prescribe them must be sanctioned for their professional ignorance.

As things are, one can only hope that the cheap medicines bill will not turn out to be imperfect as several, otherwise landmark, laws we had passed—like those on oil deregulation, value-added tax, tobacco and alcohol taxes, lateral attrition, and, more recently, biofuels, each of which is now waiting to be either suspended or repealed to better serve the common good.

RUDY L. CORONEL, 10 Venus St., Golden Country Homes, Alangilan, Batangas City