Joshua Krause
Now that negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement have been finalized, there is one last hurdle before the treaty can be ratified. Congress will have to read the final product, and decide if our country is going to adopt the corporatist rag. But until then, they’ll be witnessing plenty of protests from average citizens who see this document for what it is.
One of those citizens is Zahara Heckscher, who was protesting the trade agreement at a TPP conference in Atlanta, Georgia. She was seen with a shirt that read “I Have Cancer. I Can’t Wait Years” and was carrying a medication drip that said “TPP: Don’t Cut My IV.” She was promptly arrested by the police after she refused to leave the hotel where the meeting was being held. In a later statement she explained that a provision of the TPP would allow companies to have a monopoly on biologic cancer treatment drugs for 8 years, and that “Some of these medicines cost up to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. When you have breast cancer today, you can’t wait 8 years or 7 years or 6 years for a treatment to become available or affordable.”
These biologic drugs are derived from living organisms, and don’t currently have the same copyright protection of traditional drugs. Though that could change if certain provisions of the TPP are agreed upon, (we still don’t know exactly what it says) in which case the price of these medicines would skyrocket. Heckscher is calling this TPP provision a “death sentence clause” and that ” thousands of women like me will die waiting.”
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Contributed by Joshua Krause of The Daily Sheeple.
Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personalTwitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger .
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