1990 Annual Report

more than one million citizens-including the Louisiana Academy of Family Physicians, the Louisiana
Arthritis Foundation, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP-were mobilized as part of the effort. The open-formulary
legislation was passed by the Louisiana House by a vote of 99 to 0 and by the Senate by a vote of 34
to 1. PMA currently is very active on these top-priority issues in many other states.
Internationally, PMA continued to make progress in three key areas-the European Community s move toward a common market by 1992, the strengthening of intellectual property rights in individual
foreign countries and the Uruguay Round of negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT).
The European Commission indicated, as the industry had requested, that pharmaceutical companies will have the option after 1992-at least for a transition period-of submitting new drugs for
approval to the EC drug-approval agency or on a country-by-country basis. The scheme must be modified,
however, to extend the transition period and to improve the rules that will apply during the transition
to what eventually will be a more centralized system. The Commission also embraced the concept of
patent-term restoration, which will bring the European Community in line with the U.S. and Japan on
this key issue.
In the bilateral area, a number of countries-including Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Poland and
Czechoslovakia-either provided product-patent protection for pharmaceuticals or announced their intention to do so. And Mexico announced that it would provide such protection six years earlier than
originally planned-in 1991 instead of 1997.
In the GATT negotiations, scheduled to be completed by the end of 1990, substantial progress
was made on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Protection (TRIP). It now appears that
GATT's intellectual-property provisions will be strengthened, and will specifically cover pharmaceuticals.
Thus, during the past year, the industry made considerable progress on many key matters. The
two main issues the industry faces in the year ahead are cost containment and the move toward an
integrated common market in Europe by 1992. The industry is fully prepared to address these and all
other issues in a unified and forceful way-with the overriding goal being to strengthen the conditions
for continuing pharmaceutical innovation.
Ulcer Gallstones
$ Thousands $ Thousands
10 5
$4,000
$7,200 8 4
6 3
4 $1,500 2
21
$500
Annual Surgery Annual Surgery
Drug Therapy Drug Therapy

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