Access to drugs should be available to everybody, on a need basis, not wealth basis. Just like health care in general (or even infrastructure), pharma research should be financed by taxes.
Going forward, open source would work much better for drugs than for-profit models. It does the long tail better. Bill Gates famously said that baldness is treated before malaria because of the aggregate economic power of the "customers". Similarly, Microsoft etc release Windows for x86 while Linux even runs on Toasters. Because without patents, anyone in the world can build on the work of others. Like they do in, you know, science. If they help the third world it will be by standing on the shoulders of giants, legally:<p><a href="http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93" rel="nofollow">http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93</a>
homepage is social media fauxtrage garbage, but there is some real information at
<a href="http://handsoff.msf.org/generics-under-attack#anchor" rel="nofollow">http://handsoff.msf.org/generics-under-attack#anchor</a>