Breaking the Medicine Monopolies: Reflections of a Generic Drug Pioneer

Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a lawyer’s personal narrative of the events that led to the widespread use of low-cost generic drugs and the current drug price crisis.

Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a personal narrative about Alfred Engelberg’s fifty years of legal work in the drug industry. He takes you inside the mysterious world of patents to provide a basic understanding of how drug makers have gamed the laws governing brand and generic competition, misused patents to prolong monopolies, and delayed generic competition on old drugs instead of focusing on discovering new ones. In this book, Engelberg provides readers with an understanding of how the growing use of low-cost generic drugs led to the highest prices in the world for new drugs, and how middlemen in the drug distribution chain have exploited a lack of price transparency in order to earn excessive profits. Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how ill-considered policy decisions and an inept patent system led to unaffordable prices for new drugs, and what can be done to correct the problem.