[_edo]

If a new drug isn't useful it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has exclusive rights to it.

If people are buying/being prescribed drugs that don't improve their health that's a different problem that won't be solved by changing intellectual property law.

[breck]

The problem is it does in practice. Almost all of the profitable drugs turn out to be useless (often harmful actually). I agree there is another problem here: medical science is laughable bad (and that’s a problem of tooling and poor data science tools, which I work on), as the combinatorics are much larger than our tools are currently capable of handling. But in the meantime, while people are still allowed to pitch junk science as fact, and medical decisions are based on junk science, the least we can do is stop rewarding monopoly profits to drugs with scant real evidence of support.