1AC - Indigenous Music 1NC - T Util Consult WHO CP Mis-disclosure Case 1AR - All 2NR - Util Consult WHO CP Mis-disclosure 2AR - Case T Mis-disclosure Consult WHO CP
Grapevine Classic
3
Opponent: Dulles VN | Judge: TJ Maher
1AC - Kant 1NC - Combo Shell Case 1AR - Check violation in CX Shell All 2NR - Combo Shell Check violation in CX Shell 2AR - Check violation in CX Shell
Grapevine Classic
5
Opponent: McNeil | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo
1AC - Biopiracy 1NC - Util Spec Tribal Influence Consult WHO CP Climate Patents DA Case 1AR - All Consult CPs Bad 2NR - Consult WHO CP 2AR - Case Consult WHO CP
Grapevine Classic
Triples
Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Joseph Georges
1AC - Evergreening 1NC - Climate Patents DA Single Payer CP Weed PIC Case 1AR - All 2NR - Weed PIC Case 2AR - Case Weed PIC
Greenhill
2
Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy
1AC - EU 1NC - T-WTO Scientist CP SetCol Case 1AR - All 2NR - Scientist CP Dedev Case 2AR - All
Greenhill
3
Opponent: Plano East AW | Judge: Kartikeya Kotamraju
1AC - Evergreening 1NC - Infrastructure DA Obviousness CP Case 1AR - All Condo 2NR - Condo Infrastructure DA Case 2AR - Case Infrastructure DA
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Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact Info
Tournament: Contact Info | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Me Hi, I'm Miller. Feel free to ask me any questions. Email: millerlroberts@gmail.com FB: Miller Roberts Phone: 512-293-7884
9/3/21
0 - Navigation
Tournament: Navigation | Round: 1 | Opponent: You | Judge: Me 0 - Important Stuff 1 - Theory Interps 2 - K Generics 3 - Other Generics (fw, cp, etc.) SeptOct - September/October Topic NovDec - November/December Topic JanFeb - January/February Topic MarApr - March/April Topic
9/3/21
3 - NC - Util v1
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Interlake DB | Judge: Jayanne Forrest The standard is maximizing expected well-being, or hedonistic act utilitarianism. 1 Neuroscience- pleasure and pain are intrinsic value and disvalue – everything else regresses. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/ R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. 2 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied. 3 No intent-foresight distinction – if I foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of my deliberation since its intrinsic to my action 4 TJFs – Consequentialism is key to economic and welfare debates. Semple PhD 19 JD, PhD, Associate Professor @ Uni of Windsor Faculty of Law "Welfare-Consequentialism and Social Policy." IPPA, Publication date unstated, author accessed sources June 9, 2019, https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/file/paper/5cfaa3d488f4a.pdf JW Utilitarianism is the oldest form of welfare-consequentialism. It holds that the moral value of an outcome is determined by simply adding up the numbers for the individuals affected. If operating on utilitarian welfare-consequentialism, the government would decide to create camp on the beach. An alternative is the prioritarian social welfare function. This gives weight to equality as well as the maximization of welfare. Different prioritarian functions reflect different degrees of aversion to inequality.10 Some prioritarian social welfare functions would tell the castaways’ government to choose the second option (making camp on the plateau), because welfare is more evenly divided even though its sum is smaller. Regardless of whether the function is utilitarian or prioritarian, it is not the votes or choices of the residents that make one policy option morally preferable to the other. Instead, it is the fact that aggregate welfare, under the chosen function, is higher under one than it is under the other. Unlike self-interested voting, the social welfare function takes into account how large a difference a policy choice would make to each individual affected by it. 1.1 Applications and Core Commitments The social welfare function, or the closely related cost-benefit analysis approach, is often applied to evaluate economic policies involving taxation and risk regulation.11 For example, banning a potentially dangerous chemical is considered a good policy if the positive effects of doing so on individuals’ welfare (e.g. better health and longer lives) can be expected to exceed the negative effects on individuals’ welfare (e.g. lost jobs for those who manufacture the chemical, and the removal of a market option for its consumers).12 However, the approach can, in principle, be applied to any public policy question. A proposed residential apartment building would be allowed in a low-density area, despite neighbourhood opposition, if the welfare benefits of the development to prospective residents, local merchants, and other affected parties would outweigh the welfare losses to the neighbours and any other affected parties.13 A military intervention to depose a foreign dictator would be justified if the aggregate expected benefits to the dictator’s potential victims, and expected security benefits for individuals elsewhere, would outweigh welfare costs such as the loss of life in combat and financial cost of the intervention. Outweighs – a) predictability – authors assume util when writing articles, b) topic lit – non-util fws don’t engage with the core lit, c) TJFs first – theory determines substance, fairness is a gateway issue to the ballot and education is the impact.
Impact calc – extinction outweighs A Reversibility- it forecloses the alternative because we can’t improve society if we are all dead B Structural violence- death causes suffering because people can’t get access to resources and basic necessities C Objectivity- body count is the most objective way to calculate impacts because comparing suffering is unethical D Uncertainty- if we’re unsure about which interpretation of the world is true, we should preserve the world to keep debating about it
9/11/21
SeptOct - CP - Consult WHO
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Interlake DB | Judge: Jayanne Forrest cites not working for this, check the os doc
9/11/21
SeptOct - CP - Obviousness
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 3 | Opponent: Plano East AW | Judge: Kartikeya Kotamraju CP text: States should add more stringent requirements for filing patents for medicines. Newsome 17, A (JD candidate George Washington School of Law). (2017). Side effects of evergreening may include decreased competition and increased prices in the pharmaceutical industry. AIPLA Quarterly Journal, 45(4), 791-822 Justin The current framework for evaluating a patent application, particularly the requirements of utility and nonobviousness, is insufficient for evaluating whether a secondary patent should be issued for a drug. Given that courts are tied to the low bar for utility and inconsistent with their application of nonobviousness,1 04 it is necessary to pass legislation creating a new utility requirement tailored to secondary pharmaceutical patents. This Note's Author proposes legislation language as follows: 35 U.S.C. § 106: Patentable Pharmaceutical Inventions (a) Utility requirement for secondary patent: In the case of a pharmaceutical invention claiming an improvement on a patented invention, the applicant shall demonstrate through clear and convincing evidence in the written description that such invention has increased efficacy as compared to the original. (b) Increased efficacy defined: As used in part (a), "increased efficacy" refers to a proven improvement in the mechanism of action, as disclosed in the patent claims. 0 5 (c) Mechanism of action defined: As used in part (b), "mechanism of action" refers to the process by which a drug functions to produce a therapeutic effect, as disclosed in the patent claims. 06 Under this legislation, the USPTO could grant a secondary patent only if the new formula's mechanism of action, or production of the intended pharmacological effect, in fact improves upon the patented drug's mechanism of action. For example, because VidaDrug is a chemotherapy drug, the new formula must include a change in the mechanism of action which causes an improvement in the efficacy of the drug's tumor-shrinking abilities to be eligible for a secondary patent. A formula tweak that reduces side effects is insufficient, because the underlying purpose of the drug - to treat cancer - remains unaffected.
Solves best. Newsome 17, A (JD candidate George Washington School of Law). (2017). Side effects of evergreening may include decreased competition and increased prices in the pharmaceutical industry. AIPLA Quarterly Journal, 45(4), 791-822 Justin Pharmaceutical patents are inherently different from software or manufacturing patents. 144 Pharmaceutical companies create life-saving drugs that carry a very serious benefit for a vulnerable group of consumers - patients. Because of this, the pharmaceutical industry should be held to a higher standard if its companies seek to prohibit affordable generic drugs from coming to the marketplace.
An Efficacy-Focused Standard Will Motivate Pharmaceutical Companies to Channel Resources to Creating Real Innovation Pharmaceutical companies argue that patent-life-cycle-management strategies (their preferred name for those tactics described herein as evergreening) are essential to ensuring they recoup RandD costs. 145 However, creation of a standard such as the one proposed here would ensure that pharmaceutical companies are properly incentivized to channel RandD resources to creating measurable change in the drugs, rather than creating minor changes that prolong the time they can profit off of monopolies at the expense of patients. For those industries in which RandD is more productive, like the pharmaceutical industry, "patent procedures should be refined to tighten the relationship between patents and the underlying inventions."14 6 2. A Higher Standard for Secondary Pharmaceutical Patents Will Increase Competition and Lead to Lower Prices The patent system enables pharmaceutical companies to retain market exclusivity for their drugs, allowing them to set high prices without an eye toward competition.1 47 The companies cite the need to recoup RandD costs as the driving factor for their pricing decisions,148 but critics say their main motivation is making a profit.'49 While the pharmaceutical companies' argument may hold weight, high prices for drugs have a negative impact on those patients who need those drugs, but cannot afford them.150 Tightening patent laws to prevent pharmaceutical companies from retaining patent protection for minor changes in their patented drugs will allow other companies to enter the marketplace sooner and drive prices down through competition. 5
9/18/21
SeptOct - CP - Scientists
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy Text: A nation appointed international panel of scientists including National Academies and corresponding organizations should reduce trade secret protections for medicines by requiring that plaintiffs prove that the acquisition, use, and disclosure of the trade secret did not pertain to revealing misconduct, wrongdoing, or illegal activity, or to protecting the general public interest and manage similar conflicts of interest between intellectual property.
International panel of science diplomats can rule over IP---that’s key to science diplomacy. Hajjar and Greenbaum 18 David; Dean Emeritus and University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Biochemistry and Pathology at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, a Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academies at the U.S. Department of State, and a recent Senior Fellow in Science Policy at the Brookings Institute; Steven; Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was a Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academies at the U.S. Department of State; “Leveraging Diplomacy for Managing Scientific Challenges,” American Diplomacy; September 18; https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2018/09/leveraging-diplomacy-for-managing-scientific-challenges-an-opportunity-to-navigate-the-future-of-science/ Justin At the global level, science diplomacy is defined as cooperation among countries in order to solve complex problems through scientific research and education (1). For example, science diplomacy plays an important role in resolving global issues related to the ecosystem (such as clean water, food safety, energy conservation, and preservation of the environment). It also addresses problems related to the healthcare industry. For example, scientists have served at the international level to forge the Middle Eastern Cancer Consortium a decade ago to facilitate better healthcare and improve cancer research in the region. Whether one considers science for diplomacy or diplomacy for science, international science collaborations benefit from allowing science diplomats (broadly defined as science envoys, science attaches, embassy fellows) to help establish positive international relationships between the U.S., Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia, particularly when proprietary disputes arise (2, 3). These various types of science diplomats already exist; some, like embassy fellows and science envoys, have one-year appointments so their role may be limited, while attaches usually have two or three year appointments that may allow them to be more successful in long, protracted negotiations. In any event, we believe that scientists can play more of a role in advancing international scientific cooperation. A key point addressed here is how to balance security concerns against the need for free exchange of information needed for innovation and growth. Both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are already engaged in supporting American science and strengthening collaborations abroad. Such efforts take advantage of international expertise, facilities, and equipment. Here, we provide a rationale for the use of diplomacy to address scientific challenges. This approach allows some scientists working as diplomats to help manage complex and potentially conflicting situations that arise between scientific communities and their governments. Such issues include managing disputes such as licensing agreements for intellectual property (IP) and providing protection of IP. International collaborations can not only support but also accelerate the advancement of science. However, collaborations may carry risk if IP is misappropriated for other purposes. International collaborations should have a basis in strategy and specific goals (for example, drug discovery) in order to justify the use of government and/or corporate funds. About a decade ago, a group of academics from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom assembled the “Manchester Manifesto,” subtitled “Who Owns Science” (6). This document addressed the lack of alignment between commercial interests, intellectual rights, and credit to the researcher. In our (and commonly held) view, the groups representing these disparate values could benefit from diplomatic mediation. More recently, it has become increasing apparent that managing China as a science and technology superpower represents another challenge for the U.S. Resolution of issues such as ownership of IP, rights to reagents, or use of skilled laboratory personnel from international collaborations may require the efforts of science diplomats. There are few international offices or “guardians” to protect junior and senior scientists in corporate or academic sectors from misuse of reagents or piracy. China’s failure to respect IP rights, and the resulting piracy, has drawn much attention. The media have also focused on the failure of watchdog government agencies to detect and manage these unwanted activities. Industrial espionage compromises U.S. interests. Moreover, Chinese and Russian hackers have cyberattacked U.S. technology companies, financial institutions, media groups, and defense contractors. In 2018, industrial spying was even reported in a major medical school in New York City where scientists were alleged to have illegally shared research findings with Chinese companies. The U.S. has a long history of hiring research personnel from other countries to staff its laboratories and industrial RandD centers. These scientists and engineers have made critical contributions to our nation’s well-being and security. These young Chinese and South Asian graduates of U.S. programs a generation ago now staff our research enterprise. However, recent trends in U.S. graduate school applications in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) reflect a downturn in foreign applicants, particularly from China. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the number of American-born students seeking STEM degrees is not sufficient to satisfy future demands of our high-tech workforce. While our own educational reforms must be augmented, we cannot ignore the need to continue to recruit overseas talent. We believe that foreign scientists can continue to make critical discoveries in the U. S. provided that their talent is nurtured, developed, and harnessed for the common good. At the same time, American companies cannot hire foreign scientists if they take the ideas they generate in U.S. laboratories back to their home countries without proper credit or permission. If the advancement of science is to succeed, greater diplomatic cooperation is needed to solve and manage proprietary issues for the benefit of all (5, 6). So, how does one strike the proper balance between security and growth? Science is a universal social enterprise; international conferences lead to friendships and productive collaborations between nations. Given that the U.S. and Chinese governments recognize the need for international communication and collaboration then surely there should be a mechanism for adjudicating anticipated conflicts. One approach would be for government, industrial, and academic stakeholders to form an international panel of scientists and engineers to manage any conflicts of interest between the need to protect proprietary information crucial to a company’s competitive edge, and the need for students and young faculty members to publish their findings. Smaller scale efforts along these lines have recently given rise to unique global partnerships, such as fellowship support by major pharmaceutical companies, which aim to address these conflicts to the benefit of both parties. An added feature of such arrangements is that they often provide corporate financing for research (9). Can this corporate-academic partnership model be adapted to multinational joint RandD efforts while protecting IP? This question falls squarely within the purview of international science diplomacy, whereby science diplomats can establish rules of conduct governing joint global technology development with proper IP protection. Despite the highly publicized and legitimate piracy allegations against China, at least some data indicates that the Chinese legal system is responding positively to worldwide pressure to honor foreign IP. A 2016 study by Love, Helmers, and Eberhardt, for example, found that between 2006 and 2011, foreign companies brought over 10 percent of patent infringement cases in China, and won over 70 percent of those cases (10). Today, “win rates” average around 80 percent, and “injunction rates,” around 98 percent (10). As Chinese scientists and engineers increasingly enter the top tier of the innovation space, their growing awareness of their own need for IP protection could be a powerful motivating force for the protection of all IP. As stated earlier, science diplomats could catalyze this progress even further by direct negotiations with those parties involved in the conflicts. An obvious flaw in this optimistic outlook is that scientists in the U.S. wield more influence with their government than scientists in China wield with theirs. And to the extent that the Chinese government could be encouraging IP theft, this must be addressed first by those international companies/firms who want to do business with the Chinese. Chinese investments, as well as tech incubators and targeted acquisitions, can enable access to U.S. technologies for commercial development. Although this conveys a level of risk to the developers, it may provide valuable opportunities for U.S. companies as well. In many respects, the extensive engagement and collaboration in innovation between the U.S. and China, often characterized by open exchanges of ideas, talent, and technologies, can be mutually beneficial in enriching and accelerating innovation in both countries. In summary, we believe that science diplomats could help address the increasingly complex issues that arise between accelerating scientific and engineering advances, and the need to protect national security and corporate IP. We also propose that this might be accomplished by asking the National Academies to recommend academic, corporate, and government scientific leaders to serve on an international scientific advisory board, and for the corresponding organizations in other countries to do the same. Access to the free flow of information promotes new knowledge and innovation. A return to a more restrictive intellectual environment is not only harmful to progress, but also nearly impossible to manage in the current internet age. A good place to start would be to engage the newly appointed head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (the Science Advisor to the President of the United States), and working groups within established organizations. These organizations include the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) or the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and corresponding international organizations. What incentive is there for a busy and successful scientist to serve in such capacity? It is the same altruism that motivates us to accept assignments as journal editors, manuscript reviewers, or funding agency panelists for the advancement of science toward the greater good.
Solves every existential threat. Haynes 18—research associate in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School (Trevor, “Science Diplomacy: Collaboration in a rapidly changing world,” http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/science-diplomacy-collaboration-rapidly-changing-world/, dml) Re-Cut Justin Today’s world is extremely interconnected. Most of us take this fact for granted, but its implications cannot be overstated. The rate at which information, resources, and people are able to move from one part of the world to another continues to accelerate at an alarming rate. Undoubtedly, this development has done society immense good. In the last century, global life expectancy has doubled, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has dropped by about 60, and world literacy rates have increased by a similar margin. But while these statistics paint a promising picture of human civilization, human progress rests on a fragile foundation of international cooperation; the challenges presented by an interconnected world are immense. War, natural disasters, and economic collapse now exert their effects globally, creating economic and ecological disasters and mass human migrations on an unprecedented scale. And with the US pulling out of major multilateral agreements on trade, climate change mitigation, and denuclearization, you might wonder if our ability to collaborate across borders productively is really up to the task. Global challenges require global solutions, and global solutions require collaboration between countries both big and small, rich and poor, authoritative and democratic. There are few human enterprises capable of providing continuity across these differences, and as technological solutions are becoming available to some of our most pressing issues, two in particular will be necessary to getting the job done: science and diplomacy. While science has long been utilized as a means to reach political ends—think of British explorer James Cook’s mapping of unexplored continents or the United States’ Manhattan Project—a more formal integration of scientists into the diplomatic process is being undertaken. This effort, which has led to scientists and academics playing a direct role in foreign policy development and international relations, has given birth of a new branch of diplomacy: science diplomacy. What is science diplomacy? As both the term and concept of science diplomacy have only recently gained traction in scientific and diplomatic circles, it’s been given a variety of definitions. But common to them all is the focus on applying scientific expertise to an international effort. The focus of these efforts is to solve international problems collaboratively while balancing economic prosperity, environmental protection, and societal wellbeing. The challenge of reaching this balance in the face of a booming global population cannot be understated, but this new branch of diplomacy is already at work and is producing results. International agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal are two famous examples, and science diplomacy is also establishing international collaboration in many other important arenas. While these lesser known efforts may not dominate the headlines, they are quietly tackling the global issues of today and preparing us for those of tomorrow. Natural disasters don’t respect national boundaries (and neither does the aftermath) In 2013, the number of refugees displaced by natural disasters—hurricanes, droughts, earthquakes—outnumbered those displaced by war. Current projections estimate as many as 1 billion people may be displaced by natural disasters by the year 2050. That would mean 1 in 9 people on the planet displaced and looking for a home. Compare this to the estimated 12 million refugees displaced by the war in Syria, and a frightening picture begins to form. As natural disasters continue to increase in both their frequency and intensity, solutions for mitigating the risk of total catastrophe will be underpinned by science, technology, and the ability of the international community to collaborate. Many organizations are starting to tackle these problems through the use of science diplomacy. The center for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) is composed of ten national committees—a network of government sponsored research institutions across the world in countries ranging the political and economic scale. These working groups have committed to improving disaster-risk-reduction science and technology while providing guidance to policy makers charged with implementing disaster prevention and mitigation strategies. IRDR is governed by a committee comprising experienced scientists and natural disaster experts. Its members come from all over the world—the US, China, Uganda, Norway, Mexico, Venezuela, and more. The diversity of this organization starts at the top and is crucial to developing comprehensive risk-reduction strategies. Data and insights from countries with varying areas of expertise are being shared and built upon, facilitating more accurate natural disaster forecasting and better strategies for mitigating their destructive power. And by including representatives from countries of varying political and economic power in its leadership, IRDR ensures that its work will consider the needs of the global community at large, rather than just nations with considerable wealth and political standing. The results of this type of international collaboration speak for themselves. Although humanity is grappling with more natural disasters than ever before, deaths related to these incidents continue to trend downward. Operating outside of the typical political framework that dominates foreign relations, IRDR provides a model for effective collaboration across the geopolitical spectrum in the face of a major global issue. Explore or Exploit? Managing international spaces Over the last few decades the polar ice cap that covers much of the Arctic Ocean has been shrinking. So much so, that during the warm season vast areas of previously solid ice have become open waters, creating opportunities for new trade routes and exposing the Arctic’s enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. Depending on your values, this will sound either like an opportunity for huge economic development of the region or the inevitable exploitation of one of the last untouched natural territories on the planet. And if you live there, like the half a million indigenous people who currently do, how this territory is managed will determine where you can live, how (and if) you can make a living, and what the health of the ecosystems that have supported Arctic life for millennia will look like. Luckily, such a scenario was predicted decades ago. In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the then Soviet Union, delivered a speech outlining his aspirations for the arctic to be explored rather than exploited—to radically reduce military presence, create a collaborative multinational research effort, cooperate on matters of environmental security, and open up the Northern Sea Route for trade. This speech laid the foundation for the Arctic Council (Figure 1), which is one of the most successful examples of science diplomacy at work. Composed of the eight Arctic nations, including geopolitical rivals US and Russia, and numerous groups of indigenous peoples, the Arctic Council was established to maintain Gorbachev’s vision for the region while giving the indigenous peoples a seat at the negotiating table. The council’s activities are conducted by six scientific and technology-based working groups who conduct research in the area and provide knowledge and recommendations to the council members. As a result of this research, and allowing scientists to take part in the negotiations, the Arctic council has enacted several legally binding agreements regarding the sustainable development and environmental protection of the Arctic Ocean. These agreements have facilitated cooperation on a number of important issues including search and rescue operations, prevention and containment of maritime oil pollution, and, most recently, enhanced data sharing and scientific research collaborations. Against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relations, the US and Russia have co-chaired task forces that laid the foundation for these agreements, proving to the world that meaningful results can be achieved through the avenue of science diplomacy, regardless of geopolitics. Science diplomacy going forward The technical expertise that characterizes science diplomacy will continue to be in demand across many realms of foreign policy. For example, synthetic biology and gene-editing technology continue to factor into matters regarding agriculture and trade. Also, digital currencies, such as bitcoin, have changed the way economists and businesses are approaching markets. Finally, machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used by governments as a means for population control, giving rise to a new type of governance—digital authoritarianism. While this expertise will be necessary for managing such issues, building international coalitions can’t be done through a purely scientific and technical lens. Convincing others to cooperate means providing them with a convincing argument to do so, and in terms they understand and find compelling. To achieve this, scientists must be trained to communicate their expertise in a way that moves stakeholders in policy discussions to act. This means appealing to motivations they have been largely taught to put to the side—whether they be political, economic, or emotional in nature—without obscuring the data and insights they have to offer. For our leaders, policy makers, and diplomats to effectively understand issues underpinned by science and technology, experts in these fields must continue to be integrated into the mechanisms of governance. With scientists in the US running for elections in numbers like never before, we can expect this trend to continue. And in the face of a rising wave of nationalism across the world, it is crucial that we do everything we can to foster collaboration. The future of human civilization depends on it.
9/18/21
SeptOct - CP - Single Payer
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: Triples | Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Joseph Georges Text – States ought to individually domestically establish single-payer national health insurance. Fund private public partnerships with pharmaceutical companies over developing solutions to Neglected tropical diseases and AMR super bugs
Solves evergreening and drug prices while avoiding our innovation turns. Narayanan 19 Srivats Narayanan 8-15-2019 "Medicare for All and Evergreening" https://medium.com/@srivats.narayanan/medicare-for-all-and-evergreening-cb84c930e0ea (UMKC School of Medicine)Elmer Drug companies rake in massive profits. The pharmaceutical industry has some of the largest profit margins among American industries. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical giants don’t always have patients’ best interests in mind — they make a big portion of their money by exploiting the patent process instead of making breakthrough drugs that would meaningfully improve patients’ lives. Pharmaceutical corporations aren’t as innovative as one might expect. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been consistently approving new (and expensive) drugs every year, most of these drugs aren’t impacting healthcare much. Many studies have revealed that a whopping 85–90 of new drugs since the mid-1990s “provide few or no clinical advantages.” This is because pharmaceutical firms are spending their time and money on a technique known as “evergreening.” Evergreening is when drug companies produce redundant drugs that are nothing but minor modifications of old drugs. By making slight alterations to their medicines, biotech companies continue to hold patents for drugs with minimal spending on research and development (RandD). Pharmaceutical companies then use those patents to prevent competitors from selling generic versions of their drugs. Without any competition, these corporations get away with ridiculously high drug pricing and can thus make big profits on their drugs. The companies simultaneously justify their absurd drug prices by pointing to the inflated RandD costs of producing new drugs. This excuse has been used time and again by the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry, and it’s coming at the expense of patients who struggle to afford their medicines. A well-known example of evergreening pertains to the anticonvulsant medication gabapentin, which was first sold by Pfizer under the brand name Neurontin. When the drug became available as a generic medication over a decade ago, Pfizer created a very similar medicine, pregabalin (Lyrica), that didn’t have any significant benefits over the original drug. As a result, Pfizer has kept a control over the market for anticonvulsant drugs with negligible innovation. The drug industry’s reliance on evergreening is undoubtedly stifling innovation. This is where Medicare for All, which would impose the government as the only health insurer, would be useful. In our current system, there are many insurers and they each have little market power and consequently little negotiating power to reduce treatment prices. Since the government would have consolidated control over healthcare financing under Medicare for All, its stronger bargaining power would force drug companies to charge lower prices for their products. In addition, prescription drugs would be paid for by the government and not by patients under Medicare for All. Medicare for All would prevent evergreening. National healthcare financing would align how much the government pays a drug company with how much patients benefit from the company’s drugs. If a new drug had more clinical benefits than an older version, the government would pay more for it. If a new drug produced the same results as an older version, the government wouldn’t pay more for the new drug. So, Medicare for All would encourage pharmaceutical companies to pursue truly innovative drugs because such drugs would be more profitable. The policy would incentivize companies to invest in RandD for more useful drugs, instead of just producing redundant and expensive medications. A national healthcare plan would prioritize “patient and community needs” and match up pharmaceutical companies’ interests with actually improving public health. Evergreening has become the name of the game for the pharmaceutical industry. A major solution to the evergreening problem is Medicare for All. A single-payer system like Medicare for All would sharply curtail evergreening, since drug companies wouldn’t be able to profit from it. Medicare for All would usher in a new era of medical innovation.
9/13/21
SeptOct - CP - Weed
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: Triples | Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Joseph Georges Counterplan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines except for cannabis, medical marijuana, and medicines containing chemicals from cannabis. It competes – weed is a medicine and is used in medicine WebMD 20 WebMD Medical Reference, WebMD is an American corporation known primarily as an online publisher of news and information pertaining to human health and well-being. The site includes information pertaining to drugs. It is one of the top healthcare websites by unique visitors. It was founded in 1998 by internet entrepreneur Jeff Arnold., August 20, 2020, "Medical Marijuana FAQ,", WebMD LLC, https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/medical-marijuana-faq, 8-21-2021 WHS MR What is medical marijuana? Medical marijuana uses the marijuana plant or chemicals in it to treat diseases or conditions. It's basically the same product as recreational marijuana, but it's taken for medical purposes. The marijuana plant contains more than 100 different chemicals called cannabinoids. Each one has a different effect on the body. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) are the main chemicals used in medicine. THC also produces the "high" people feel when they smoke marijuana or eat foods containing it. What is medical marijuana used for? Researchers are studying whether medical marijuana can help treat a number of conditions including: Alzheimer's disease Appetite loss Cancer Crohn's disease Diseases effecting the immune system like HIV/AIDS or Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Eating disorders such as anorexia Epilepsy Glaucoma Mental health conditions like schizophrenia and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Multiple sclerosis Muscle spasms Nausea Pain Seizures Wasting syndrome (cachexia) But it’s not yet proven to help many of these conditions, with a few exceptions, Bonn-Miller says. "The greatest amount of evidence for the therapeutic effects of cannabis relate to its ability to reduce chronic pain, nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, and spasticity tight or stiff muscles from MS," Bonn-Miller says. How does it help? Cannabinoids -- the active chemicals in medical marijuana -- are similar to chemicals the body makes that are involved in appetite, memory, movement, and pain. Limited research suggests cannabinoids might: Reduce anxiety Reduce inflammation and relieve pain Control nausea and vomiting caused by cancer chemotherapy Kill cancer cells and slow tumor growth Relax tight muscles in people with MS Stimulate appetite and improve weight gain in people with cancer and AIDS Can medical marijuana help with seizure disorders? Medical marijuana received a lot of attention a few years ago when parents said that a special form of the drug helped control seizures in their children. The FDA recently approved Epidiolex, which is made from CBD, as a therapy for people with very severe or hard-to-treat seizures. In studies, some people had a dramatic drop in seizures after taking this drug. Has the FDA approved medical marijuana? The cannabidiol Epidiolex was approved in 2018 for treating seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome. In addition, the FDA has approved two man-made cannabinoid medicines -- dronabinol (Marinol, Syndros) and nabilone (Cesamet) -- to treat nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy. The cannabidiol Epidiolex was approved in 2018 for treating seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome. How do you take it? To take medical marijuana, you can: Smoke it Inhale it through a device called a vaporizer that turns it into a mist Eat it -- for example, in a brownie or lollipop Apply it to your skin in a lotion, spray, oil, or cream Place a few drops of a liquid under your tongue How you take it is up to you. Each method works differently in your body. "If you smoke or vaporize cannabis, you feel the effects very quickly," Bonn-Miller says. "If you eat it, it takes significantly longer. It can take 1 to 2 hours to experience the effects from edible products." The weed industry is growing, but needs investors to stay afloat – patents draw in investors and help companies expand Roberts 20 Chris Roberts, An award-winning investigative reporter and covered the legalization movement and the cannabis industry with a political economy lens for more than a decade. He launched northern California’s first cannabis-centric print vertical and founded San Francisco’s first dedicated drug-policy column. His work’s been featured in VICE, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Deadspin, Observer, Curbed, Leafly News, High Times, SF Weekly, and many other places. He hold a master’s degree in politics from Columbia Journalism School, 5-28-2020, "Why Patent Cannabis? For Markets, Mostly.," Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2020/05/28/why-patent-cannabis-for-markets-mostly/, 8-21-2021 WHS MR On May 20, Charlotte’s Web, the Colorado-based CBD giant and arguably one of the biggest names in legal cannabis, announced that the company was awarded its second federal patent on a cannabis plant. Unlike the company’s 2018 plant patent on a Farm Bill-compliant high-CBD hemp cultivar—which was the first hemp strain to receive federal intellectual property protection—US Patent No. 10,653,085 is a utility patent. This means, after satisfying a more rigorous process, including dropping off thousands of seeds at an official United States depository, Charlotte’s Web now claims as its intellectual property both the cultivar of hemp the company calls CW1AS1 as well as “methods” of plant production and cannabinoid extraction. Okay! But so what? Why patent a hemp strain—why patent two? What does it all mean? Does Charlotte’s Web now have legal claim to the entire CBD game?To the last question, no. And as for what this means, for normal people and cannabis consumers, very little. For patent attorneys or competitors of Charlotte’s Web in the CBD industry, it portends a little more, but just a little. At least for now, cannabis patents like this one aren’t really intended to defend intellectual property in court—which is where a patent has its most practical value. No, this patent is probably meant for the market. Patents like this exist mostly for companies to satisfy and woo investors, for whom a company’s ability to say “Look! I have a patent” might be the difference between signing a check, or not. And like all publicly traded cannabis companies, Charlotte’s Web has a lot of spooked and angry investors who need pleasing. Patents “generate interest in the company, and are something investors would look at,” said Jonathan Hyman, an attorney and partner at the Los Angeles office of Knobbe Martens. Whether Charlotte’s Web would enforce the patent, and how, “remains to be seen,” he added. Company officials were not available to discuss the matter. In a statement provided by Sylvia Tawse, the company’s director of communications, CEO Deanie Elsner said Charlotte’ Web “will continue to pursue patent protection for unique and novel hemp genetics developed by our horticulture division.” Whether that meant there are any pretenders the company plans to sue, she did not say. Though cannabis-related patent applications have been a thing since well before legalization and have tripled since 2015, as IP Watchdog noted, the mere phrase “cannabis patent” can still be triggering in cannabis circles. Patent talk can often lead to galaxy-brain thinking like the “Monsanto is supporting legalization in order to steal cannabis” or the “Philip Morris is buying up land in Humboldt County” conspiracy theories. In the case of Charlotte’s Web, the company’s already locked up what’s probably its most valuable asset: its name. Charlotte’s Web is named for Charlotte Figi, the sufferer of childhood epilepsy who enjoyed relief from her symptoms after taking an extract of high-CBD cannabis grown by the Stanley brothers (and who died earlier this month after contracting COVID-19). The world came to know Charlotte Figi and the Stanley brothers, seven photogenic Coloradans whose first names all begin with J, after they were prominently featured in a 2014 CNN special hosted by Sanjay Gupta. A very famous children’s book and a very famous and recognizable name, the company was sure lock down the name “Charlotte’s Web” with a trademark—one the company is currently defending in federal court, after a rival company dared market CBD products called Charlotte’s Web. That’s what patents are for in terms of the law. But markets are another matter—and it’s worth observing that the company went public after securing its first patent. Like almost all publicly traded companies in the cannabis sector, Charlotte’s Web is stuck in high-loss doldrums after hitting early peaks. For the past week, shares in Charlotte’s Web have been trading in the $7 to $9 range in the Toronto Stock Exchange. That’s a big gain from the $4.24 seen at the company’s mid-March nadir, but still far below last summer’s high-water mark of $28.21, set in August. Despite being sold in more than 11,000 stores, the company still lost $1.7 million in 2020—a hit smaller than other companies in the cannabis sector, but still in the red. Patenting hemp genetics and the processes to achieve them won’t be enough to rescue the rest of the company’s lost value. But if Charlotte’s Web wants to be a global CBD brand, with product in supermarkets and convenience stores all over the globe—and why wouldn’t it?—this means something. "Having this patent, that they can wave around and say, 'Hey, we've got coverage on it, and it's the best variety of CBD rich hemp that you're going to get,’ ” said Andrew Merickel, who holds a Phd in neuroscience and is also an attorney and partner at the San Francisco office of Knobbe Martens. “That’s pretty valuable.” How valuable? That’s all up to the logic of the market. Cannabis is key to agricultural tech innovation – k2 long term sustainability and security Yamazaki 17 Kevin Yamazaki (founder and CEO of Sidebench, a leading digital product and venture studio that creates custom software and apps), 3-27-2017, "High Tech: How Marijuana Legalization Breeds Innovation," Observer, https://observer.com/2017/03/high-tech-how-marijuana-legalization-breeds-innovation/, SJBE With the competition blazing and increased legalization on the horizon, we can expect to see the weed market become a hotbed for tech innovations. Forecasts indicate that revenue in the U.S. from medical marijuana alone will reach at least $10.8 billion by 2018. When states expand to allow recreational use, this number will surely increase. As investors become more comfortable deploying capital around cannabis, tech will revolutionize the marijuana ecosystem for producers, distributors, and consumers alike. The future of marijuana innovation Innovation has begun to outpace legalization as tech organizations make groundbreaking strides in researching and developing applications for marijuana. For example, Kalytera is exploring how cannabidiol — a non-psychoactive cannabinoid with a number of potential medical applications — can be used to target diseases such as obesity and osteoporosis. The findings of such research could transform how people cope with chronic illness and pain. Companies are also experimenting with improvements in weed-growing processes. Cannabis is a finicky crop, so the ability to fine-tune growing processes could generate products far superior to today’s. Several organizations are devising smart, energy-efficient systems that automatically adjust growing environments according to changes in moisture, temperature, and sunlight. Meanwhile, data-capture technologies enable growers to identify optimal conditions for their plants, leading to larger and better-quality yields. The primary speed bump for the industry at this point is that marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug and is illegal at the federal level. Even if this factor doesn’t inhibit marijuana-centric technology innovation directly, it certainly has a strong indirect effect, as many potential financiers (and entrepreneurs) are scared away by either fear of prosecution or skepticism about the industry’s stability. That said, as more states allow for medical marijuana or legalize the drug entirely, the potential market size for marijuana-centric products expands as well. Perhaps more importantly, with some form of state legalization becoming the norm rather than the exception, there is a degree of safety in numbers. Assuming we see the trend of legalization for medical and recreational uses continue, production will inevitably become an even bigger business. Technology will play an increasing role in ensuring quality, consistency, and efficiency on the production side. We’re already seeing startups like Cannafuse and Teewinoit Life Sciences focusing on providing a tech-enabled scientific approach to the mass scientific production and distribution of cannabis. Advances in the irrigation systems, efficiency lamps, and data tracking processes used to grow marijuana may have far-reaching effects beyond the cannabis industry. Industrial farmers could adopt these techniques to increase their outputs and reduce energy expenses, while building managers can use them to lower energy loads from their properties. On the consumer side, the medical marijuana industry, in particular, will likely see an explosion of on-demand delivery services. Consumers are accustomed to using their smartphones to book cars, buy groceries, and mail packages. Why wouldn’t they receive their medical marijuana that way, too? Expect to see personalized services as well — think apps that recommend strains of marijuana on the basis of your preferences. Apps such as MassRoots bring the social media aspect to what is, for many people, a social product by connecting weed enthusiasts to one another through news updates and other types of content. Even Microsoft is throwing its hat into the ring with marijuana tracking software that ensures growers comply with their tax obligations and prevents legally grown pot from ending up on the black market. As the cannabis industry expands, the opportunities for growth are diverse and extensive. Tech-enabled companies will inevitably spur that growth, driving breakthroughs in medicine, crop development, and customer experiences. The momentum created by legalization will transform a once-taboo drug into a mainstream commodity, and the tech world stands to benefit enormously. Extinction – food insecurity causes conflict and goes nuclear FDI 12 FDI Team, 25 May 2012, “Food and Water Insecurity: International Conflict Triggers and Potential Conflict Points,” Future Directions International, https://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/international-conflict-triggers-and-potential-conflict-points-resulting-from-food-and-water-insecurity/, SJBE There is little dispute that conflict can lead to food and water crises. This paper will consider parts of the world, however, where food and water insecurity can be the cause of conflict and, at worst, result in war. While dealing predominately with food and water issues, the paper also recognises the nexus that exists between food and water and energy security. There is a growing appreciation that the conflicts in the next century will most likely be fought over a lack of resources. Yet, in a sense, this is not new. Researchers point to the French and Russian revolutions as conflicts induced by a lack of food. More recently, Germany’s World War Two efforts are said to have been inspired, at least in part, by its perceived need to gain access to more food. Yet the general sense among those that attended FDI’s recent workshops, was that the scale of the problem in the future could be significantly greater as a result of population pressures, changing weather, urbanisation, migration, loss of arable land and other farm inputs, and increased affluence in the developing world. In his book, Small Farmers Secure Food, Lindsay Falvey, a participant in FDI’s March 2012 workshop on the issue of food and conflict, clearly expresses the problem and why countries across the globe are starting to take note. . He writes (p.36), “…if people are hungry, especially in cities, the state is not stable – riots, violence, breakdown of law and order and migration result.” “Hunger feeds anarchy.” This view is also shared by Julian Cribb, who in his book, The Coming Famine, writes that if “large regions of the world run short of food, land or water in the decades that lie ahead, then wholesale, bloody wars are liable to follow.” He continues: “An increasingly credible scenario for World War 3 is not so much a confrontation of super powers and their allies, as a festering, self-perpetuating chain of resource conflicts.” He also says: “The wars of the 21st Century are less likely to be global conflicts with sharply defined sides and huge armies, than a scrappy mass of failed states, rebellions, civil strife, insurgencies, terrorism and genocides, sparked by bloody competition over dwindling resources.” As another workshop participant put it, people do not go to war to kill; they go to war over resources, either to protect or to gain the resources for themselves. Another observed that hunger results in passivity not conflict. Conflict is over resources, not because people are going hungry. A study by the International Peace Research Institute indicates that where food security is an issue, it is more likely to result in some form of conflict. Darfur, Rwanda, Eritrea and the Balkans experienced such wars. Governments, especially in developed countries, are increasingly aware of this phenomenon. The UK Ministry of Defence, the CIA, the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Oslo Peace Research Institute, all identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly even nuclear war.
9/13/21
SeptOct - DA - Climate Patents
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: 5 | Opponent: McNeil | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo Climate Patents and Innovation high now and solving Warming but patent waivers set a dangerous precedent for appropriations - the mere threat is sufficient is enough to kill investment. Brand 5-26, Melissa. “Trips Ip Waiver Could Establish Dangerous Precedent for Climate Change and Other Biotech Sectors.” IPWatchdog.com | Patents and Patent Law, 26 May 2021, www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/26/trips-ip-waiver-establish-dangerous-precedent-climate-change-biotech-sectors/id=133964/. sid The biotech industry is making remarkable advances towards climate change solutions, and it is precisely for this reason that it can expect to be in the crosshairs of potential IP waiver discussions. President Biden is correct to refer to climate change as an existential crisis. Yet it does not take too much effort to connect the dots between President Biden’s focus on climate change and his Administration’s recent commitment to waive global IP rights for Covid vaccines (TRIPS IP Waiver). “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.” If an IP waiver is purportedly necessary to solve the COVID-19 global health crisis (and of course we dispute this notion), can we really feel confident that this or some future Administration will not apply the same logic to the climate crisis? And, without the confidence in the underlying IP for such solutions, what does this mean for U.S. innovation and economic growth? United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai was subject to questioning along this very line during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing. And while Ambassador Tai did not affirmatively state that an IP waiver would be in the future for climate change technology, she surely did not assuage the concerns of interested parties. The United States has historically supported robust IP protection. This support is one reason the United States is the center of biotechnology innovation and leading the fight against COVID-19. However, a brief review of the domestic legislation arguably most relevant to this discussion shows just how far the international campaign against IP rights has eroded our normative position. The Clean Air Act, for example, contains a provision allowing for the mandatory licensing of patents covering certain devices for reducing air pollution. Importantly, however, the patent owner is accorded due process and the statute lays out a detailed process regulating the manner in which any such license can be issued, including findings of necessity and that no reasonable alternative method to accomplish the legislated goal exists. Also of critical importance is that the statute requires compensation to the patent holder. Similarly, the Atomic Energy Act contemplates mandatory licensing of patents covering inventions of primary importance in producing or utilizing atomic energy. This statute, too, requires due process, findings of importance to the statutory goals and compensation to the rights holder. A TRIPS IP waiver would operate outside of these types of frameworks. There would be no due process, no particularized findings, no compensation and no recourse. Indeed, the fact that the World Trade Organization (WTO) already has a process under the TRIPS agreement to address public health crises, including the compulsory licensing provisions, with necessary guardrails and compensation, makes quite clear that the waiver would operate as a free for all. Forced Tech Transfer Could Be on The Table When being questioned about the scope of a potential TRIPS IP waiver, Ambassador Tai invoked the proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” While this answer suggests primarily that, in times of famine, the Administration would rather give away other people’s fishing rods than share its own plentiful supply of fish (here: actual COVID-19 vaccine stocks), it is apparent that in Ambassador Tai’s view waiving patent rights alone would not help lower- and middle-income countries produce their own vaccines. Rather, they would need to be taught how to make the vaccines and given the biotech industry’s manufacturing know-how, sensitive cell lines, and proprietary cell culture media in order to do so. In other words, Ambassador Tai acknowledged that the scope of the current TRIPS IP waiver discussions includes the concept of forced tech transfer. In the context of climate change, the idea would be that companies who develop successful methods for producing new seed technologies and sustainable biomass, reducing greenhouse gases in manufacturing and transportation, capturing and sequestering carbon in soil and products, and more, would be required to turn over their proprietary know-how to global competitors. While it is unclear how this concept would work in practice and under the constitutions of certain countries, the suggestion alone could be devastating to voluntary international collaborations. Even if one could assume that the United States could not implement forced tech transfer on its own soil, what about the governments of our international development partners? It is not hard to understand that a U.S.-based company developing climate change technologies would be unenthusiastic about partnering with a company abroad knowing that the foreign country’s government is on track – with the assent of the U.S. government – to change its laws and seize proprietary materials and know-how that had been voluntarily transferred to the local company. Necessary Investment Could Diminish Developing climate change solutions is not an easy endeavor and bad policy positions threaten the likelihood that they will materialize. These products have long lead times from research and development to market introduction, owing not only to a high rate of failure but also rigorous regulatory oversight. Significant investment is required to sustain and drive these challenging and long-enduring endeavors. For example, synthetic biology companies critical to this area of innovation raised over $1 billion in investment in the second quarter of 2019 alone. If investors cannot be confident that IP will be in place to protect important climate change technologies after their long road from bench to market, it is unlikely they will continue to invest at the current and required levels. Climate change destroys the world. Specktor 19 Brandon writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years 6-4-2019, "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html Justin The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom. How the world ends What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees. This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely. The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."
9/11/21
SeptOct - DA - Climate Patents v2
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: Triples | Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Joseph Georges Climate Patents and Innovation high now and solving Warming but COVID waiver sets a dangerous precedent for appropriations - the mere threat is sufficient is enough to kill investment. Brand 5-26, Melissa. “Trips Ip Waiver Could Establish Dangerous Precedent for Climate Change and Other Biotech Sectors.” IPWatchdog.com | Patents and Patent Law, 26 May 2021, www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/26/trips-ip-waiver-establish-dangerous-precedent-climate-change-biotech-sectors/id=133964/. sid The biotech industry is making remarkable advances towards climate change solutions, and it is precisely for this reason that it can expect to be in the crosshairs of potential IP waiver discussions. President Biden is correct to refer to climate change as an existential crisis. Yet it does not take too much effort to connect the dots between President Biden’s focus on climate change and his Administration’s recent commitment to waive global IP rights for Covid vaccines (TRIPS IP Waiver). “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.” If an IP waiver is purportedly necessary to solve the COVID-19 global health crisis (and of course we dispute this notion), can we really feel confident that this or some future Administration will not apply the same logic to the climate crisis? And, without the confidence in the underlying IP for such solutions, what does this mean for U.S. innovation and economic growth? United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai was subject to questioning along this very line during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing. And while Ambassador Tai did not affirmatively state that an IP waiver would be in the future for climate change technology, she surely did not assuage the concerns of interested parties. The United States has historically supported robust IP protection. This support is one reason the United States is the center of biotechnology innovation and leading the fight against COVID-19. However, a brief review of the domestic legislation arguably most relevant to this discussion shows just how far the international campaign against IP rights has eroded our normative position. The Clean Air Act, for example, contains a provision allowing for the mandatory licensing of patents covering certain devices for reducing air pollution. Importantly, however, the patent owner is accorded due process and the statute lays out a detailed process regulating the manner in which any such license can be issued, including findings of necessity and that no reasonable alternative method to accomplish the legislated goal exists. Also of critical importance is that the statute requires compensation to the patent holder. Similarly, the Atomic Energy Act contemplates mandatory licensing of patents covering inventions of primary importance in producing or utilizing atomic energy. This statute, too, requires due process, findings of importance to the statutory goals and compensation to the rights holder. A TRIPS IP waiver would operate outside of these types of frameworks. There would be no due process, no particularized findings, no compensation and no recourse. Indeed, the fact that the World Trade Organization (WTO) already has a process under the TRIPS agreement to address public health crises, including the compulsory licensing provisions, with necessary guardrails and compensation, makes quite clear that the waiver would operate as a free for all. Forced Tech Transfer Could Be on The Table When being questioned about the scope of a potential TRIPS IP waiver, Ambassador Tai invoked the proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” While this answer suggests primarily that, in times of famine, the Administration would rather give away other people’s fishing rods than share its own plentiful supply of fish (here: actual COVID-19 vaccine stocks), it is apparent that in Ambassador Tai’s view waiving patent rights alone would not help lower- and middle-income countries produce their own vaccines. Rather, they would need to be taught how to make the vaccines and given the biotech industry’s manufacturing know-how, sensitive cell lines, and proprietary cell culture media in order to do so. In other words, Ambassador Tai acknowledged that the scope of the current TRIPS IP waiver discussions includes the concept of forced tech transfer. In the context of climate change, the idea would be that companies who develop successful methods for producing new seed technologies and sustainable biomass, reducing greenhouse gases in manufacturing and transportation, capturing and sequestering carbon in soil and products, and more, would be required to turn over their proprietary know-how to global competitors. While it is unclear how this concept would work in practice and under the constitutions of certain countries, the suggestion alone could be devastating to voluntary international collaborations. Even if one could assume that the United States could not implement forced tech transfer on its own soil, what about the governments of our international development partners? It is not hard to understand that a U.S.-based company developing climate change technologies would be unenthusiastic about partnering with a company abroad knowing that the foreign country’s government is on track – with the assent of the U.S. government – to change its laws and seize proprietary materials and know-how that had been voluntarily transferred to the local company. Necessary Investment Could Diminish Developing climate change solutions is not an easy endeavor and bad policy positions threaten the likelihood that they will materialize. These products have long lead times from research and development to market introduction, owing not only to a high rate of failure but also rigorous regulatory oversight. Significant investment is required to sustain and drive these challenging and long-enduring endeavors. For example, synthetic biology companies critical to this area of innovation raised over $1 billion in investment in the second quarter of 2019 alone. If investors cannot be confident that IP will be in place to protect important climate change technologies after their long road from bench to market, it is unlikely they will continue to invest at the current and required levels. Private sector innovation is key to solve climate change – short term politicking and priority shifts means government can’t solve alone. Henry 17, Simon. “Climate Change Cannot Be Solved by Governments Alone. How Can the Private Sector Help?” World Economic Forum, 21 Nov. 2017, www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/governments-alone-cannot-halt-climate-change-what-can-private-sector-do/. Programme Director, International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA) sid Climate leadership is also an opportunity for many organizations, and this was the most popular reason for purchasing carbon credits in Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2016 survey of buyers. Companies are looking to differentiate from their competitors, and build their brand, by taking a leadership role on climate. Offsetting plays an integral role in delivering this climate leadership status, alongside direct emissions reductions. The survey indicated that companies that included offsetting in their carbon management strategy typically spend about 10 times more on emissions reductions activities than the typical company that doesn’t offset. Beyond these direct commercial reasons for companies to take voluntary action, there are many broader, societal motivations at play. Climate change is a global, multidecade challenge that needs solutions and input from all stakeholders. It transcends the short-term nature of politics, which will inevitably experience changes in priorities, personnel and knowledge. Because of this, climate change cannot be solved by governments alone. Instead, it needs significant and long-term investment from the private sector. Companies that take a longer-term outlook recognise this and want to contribute to the solution to help secure the viability of their businesses. Warming causes Extinction Kareiva 18, Peter, and Valerie Carranza. "Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back." Futures 102 (2018): 39-50. (Ph.D. in ecology and applied mathematics from Cornell University, director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment and Sustainability at UCLA)Re-cut by Elmer In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest. Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields). Climate change intersects with freshwater resources because it is expected to exacerbate drought and water scarcity, as well as flooding. Climate change can even impair water quality because it is associated with heavy rains that overwhelm sewage treatment facilities, or because it results in higher concentrations of pollutants in groundwater as a result of enhanced evaporation and reduced groundwater recharge. Ample clean water is not a luxury—it is essential for human survival. Consequently, cities, regions and nations that lack clean freshwater are vulnerable to social disruption and disease. Finally, ocean acidification is linked to climate change because it is driven by CO2 emissions just as global warming is. With close to 20 of the world’s protein coming from oceans (FAO, 2016), the potential for severe impacts due to acidification is obvious. Less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, is the interaction between climate change and the loss of oyster and coral reefs due to acidification. Acidification is known to interfere with oyster reef building and coral reefs. Climate change also increases storm frequency and severity. Coral reefs and oyster reefs provide protection from storm surge because they reduce wave energy (Spalding et al., 2014). If these reefs are lost due to acidification at the same time as storms become more severe and sea level rises, coastal communities will be exposed to unprecedented storm surge—and may be ravaged by recurrent storms. A key feature of the risk associated with climate change is that mean annual temperature and mean annual rainfall are not the variables of interest. Rather it is extreme episodic events that place nations and entire regions of the world at risk. These extreme events are by definition “rare” (once every hundred years), and changes in their likelihood are challenging to detect because of their rarity, but are exactly the manifestations of climate change that we must get better at anticipating (Diffenbaugh et al., 2017). Society will have a hard time responding to shorter intervals between rare extreme events because in the lifespan of an individual human, a person might experience as few as two or three extreme events. How likely is it that you would notice a change in the interval between events that are separated by decades, especially given that the interval is not regular but varies stochastically? A concrete example of this dilemma can be found in the past and expected future changes in storm-related flooding of New York City. The highly disruptive flooding of New York City associated with Hurricane Sandy represented a flood height that occurred once every 500 years in the 18th century, and that occurs now once every 25 years, but is expected to occur once every 5 years by 2050 (Garner et al., 2017). This change in frequency of extreme floods has profound implications for the measures New York City should take to protect its infrastructure and its population, yet because of the stochastic nature of such events, this shift in flood frequency is an elevated risk that will go unnoticed by most people. 4. The combination of positive feedback loops and societal inertia is fertile ground for global environmental catastrophes Humans are remarkably ingenious, and have adapted to crises throughout their history. Our doom has been repeatedly predicted, only to be averted by innovation (Ridley, 2011). However, the many stories of human ingenuity successfully addressing existential risks such as global famine or extreme air pollution represent environmental challenges that are largely linear, have immediate consequences, and operate without positive feedbacks. For example, the fact that food is in short supply does not increase the rate at which humans consume food—thereby increasing the shortage. Similarly, massive air pollution episodes such as the London fog of 1952 that killed 12,000 people did not make future air pollution events more likely. In fact it was just the opposite—the London fog sent such a clear message that Britain quickly enacted pollution control measures (Stradling, 2016). Food shortages, air pollution, water pollution, etc. send immediate signals to society of harm, which then trigger a negative feedback of society seeking to reduce the harm. In contrast, today’s great environmental crisis of climate change may cause some harm but there are generally long time delays between rising CO2 concentrations and damage to humans. The consequence of these delays are an absence of urgency; thus although 70 of Americans believe global warming is happening, only 40 think it will harm them (http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us-2016/). Secondly, unlike past environmental challenges, the Earth’s climate system is rife with positive feedback loops. In particular, as CO2 increases and the climate warms, that very warming can cause more CO2 release which further increases global warming, and then more CO2, and so on. Table 2 summarizes the best documented positive feedback loops for the Earth’s climate system. These feedbacks can be neatly categorized into carbon cycle, biogeochemical, biogeophysical, cloud, ice-albedo, and water vapor feedbacks. As important as it is to understand these feedbacks individually, it is even more essential to study the interactive nature of these feedbacks. Modeling studies show that when interactions among feedback loops are included, uncertainty increases dramatically and there is a heightened potential for perturbations to be magnified (e.g., Cox, Betts, Jones, Spall, and Totterdell, 2000; Hajima, Tachiiri, Ito, and Kawamiya, 2014; Knutti and Rugenstein, 2015; Rosenfeld, Sherwood, Wood, and Donner, 2014). This produces a wide range of future scenarios. Positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle involves the enhancement of future carbon contributions to the atmosphere due to some initial increase in atmospheric CO2. This happens because as CO2 accumulates, it reduces the efficiency in which oceans and terrestrial ecosystems sequester carbon, which in return feeds back to exacerbate climate change (Friedlingstein et al., 2001). Warming can also increase the rate at which organic matter decays and carbon is released into the atmosphere, thereby causing more warming (Melillo et al., 2017). Increases in food shortages and lack of water is also of major concern when biogeophysical feedback mechanisms perpetuate drought conditions. The underlying mechanism here is that losses in vegetation increases the surface albedo, which suppresses rainfall, and thus enhances future vegetation loss and more suppression of rainfall—thereby initiating or prolonging a drought (Chamey, Stone, and Quirk, 1975). To top it off, overgrazing depletes the soil, leading to augmented vegetation loss (Anderies, Janssen, and Walker, 2002). Climate change often also increases the risk of forest fires, as a result of higher temperatures and persistent drought conditions. The expectation is that forest fires will become more frequent and severe with climate warming and drought (Scholze, Knorr, Arnell, and Prentice, 2006), a trend for which we have already seen evidence (Allen et al., 2010). Tragically, the increased severity and risk of Southern California wildfires recently predicted by climate scientists (Jin et al., 2015), was realized in December 2017, with the largest fire in the history of California (the “Thomas fire” that burned 282,000 acres, https://www.vox.com/2017/12/27/16822180/thomas-fire-california-largest-wildfire). This catastrophic fire embodies the sorts of positive feedbacks and interacting factors that could catch humanity off-guard and produce a true apocalyptic event. Record-breaking rains produced an extraordinary flush of new vegetation, that then dried out as record heat waves and dry conditions took hold, coupled with stronger than normal winds, and ignition. Of course the record-fire released CO2 into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to future warming. Out of all types of feedbacks, water vapor and the ice-albedo feedbacks are the most clearly understood mechanisms. Losses in reflective snow and ice cover drive up surface temperatures, leading to even more melting of snow and ice cover—this is known as the ice-albedo feedback (Curry, Schramm, and Ebert, 1995). As snow and ice continue to melt at a more rapid pace, millions of people may be displaced by flooding risks as a consequence of sea level rise near coastal communities (Biermann and Boas, 2010; Myers, 2002; Nicholls et al., 2011). The water vapor feedback operates when warmer atmospheric conditions strengthen the saturation vapor pressure, which creates a warming effect given water vapor’s strong greenhouse gas properties (Manabe and Wetherald, 1967). Global warming tends to increase cloud formation because warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation of water into the atmosphere, and warmer temperature also allows the atmosphere to hold more water. The key question is whether this increase in clouds associated with global warming will result in a positive feedback loop (more warming) or a negative feedback loop (less warming). For decades, scientists have sought to answer this question and understand the net role clouds play in future climate projections (Schneider et al., 2017). Clouds are complex because they both have a cooling (reflecting incoming solar radiation) and warming (absorbing incoming solar radiation) effect (Lashof, DeAngelo, Saleska, and Harte, 1997). The type of cloud, altitude, and optical properties combine to determine how these countervailing effects balance out. Although still under debate, it appears that in most circumstances the cloud feedback is likely positive (Boucher et al., 2013). For example, models and observations show that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations reduces the low-level cloud fraction in the Northeast Pacific at decadal time scales. This then has a positive feedback effect and enhances climate warming since less solar radiation is reflected by the atmosphere (Clement, Burgman, and Norris, 2009). The key lesson from the long list of potentially positive feedbacks and their interactions is that runaway climate change, and runaway perturbations have to be taken as a serious possibility. Table 2 is just a snapshot of the type of feedbacks that have been identified (see Supplementary material for a more thorough explanation of positive feedback loops). However, this list is not exhaustive and the possibility of undiscovered positive feedbacks portends even greater existential risks. The many environmental crises humankind has previously averted (famine, ozone depletion, London fog, water pollution, etc.) were averted because of political will based on solid scientific understanding. We cannot count on complete scientific understanding when it comes to positive feedback loops and climate change.
9/13/21
SeptOct - DA - Infrastructure
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 3 | Opponent: Plano East AW | Judge: Kartikeya Kotamraju Infrastructure passes now due to Biden and Pelosi involvement – Biden PC and tight timetables makes the margin for error literally ZERO Elliott 9-16 (Philip Elliott is a Washington Correspondent for TIME. Before joining TIME in early 2015, he spent almost a decade at The Associated Press, where he covered politics, campaign finance, education and the White House. He is a graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, September 16, 2021, accessed on 9-17-2021, Time, "Democrats Face a Grueling Two Weeks as Infighting Erupts Over Infrastructure", https://time.com/6098810/house-democrats-reconciliation/)//babcii House Democrats yesterday finished penning a 2,600-page bill that finally outlines the specifics of their ambitious “soft” infrastructure plan that won’t attract a single Republican vote. But no one was really rushing to Schneider’s for bottles of bubbly. For a party ready to spend $3.5 trillion to fund its social policy agenda, there were plenty of glum faces on Capitol Hill. In fact, one key piece of the legislation—a deal that would finally let Medicare negotiate lower prices with drug companies—fell apart in the Energy and Commerce Committee when three Democrats voted against it. It found resurrection a short time later when Leadership aides literally plucked it from the Energy and Commerce team and delivered it to the Ways and Means Committee for its approval instead. Even there, though, one Democrat voted against it, saying the threat it posed to pharmaceutical companies’ profits would doom it in the Senate. “Every moment we spend debating provisions that will never become law is a moment wasted and will delay much-needed assistance to the American people,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida later argued. Put another way? Brace for some nasty politics over the next two weeks as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tries to get this bill to a vote before the budget year ends on Sept. 30. And those 2,600 pages had better be recyclable. Democrats can only afford three defectors if they want to usher this bill into law, and they’re perilously close to failure. So far, five centrist Democrats in the House have said they prefer a scaled-back version of the Medicare component. But if Pelosi gives the five centrists that win, she risks losing the support of progressives who are already sour that things like a punitive wealth tax and the end to tax loopholes aren’t present in the current version of the bill. As it stands now, letting Medicare negotiate drug prices would save the government about $500 billion over the next decade. The scaled-back version doesn’t have an official cost, but a very similar version got its score in the Senate last year: roughly $100 billion in savings. Because Democrats are using a budgeting loophole to help them avoid a filibuster and pass this with bare majorities, that $400 billion gap matters a lot more than on most bills. Scaling back the Medicare savings means they would also have to scale back their overall spending on the bill—a big line in the sand for progressives who say they’ve already compromised too much. All of this, of course, comes as President Joe Biden and his top aides in the White House have been trying to get Senate centrists onboard. Just yesterday, he met separately with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, fellow Democrats who have expressed worries about the $3.5 trillion price tag but have been vague about what exactly they want to cut back on. With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50, and Vice President Kamala Harris in position to break the ties to Democrats’ victories, any shenanigans from those two independent thinkers scrambles the whole package. Oh, and that other bipartisan infrastructure plan that carries $550 billion in new spending? It’s still sitting on the shelf in the House. Pelosi said she’d bring it to the floor only when the bigger—and entirely partisan—bill was ready. And there’s plenty of grumbling about that package, too. If this is all beginning to sound like a scratched record that keeps repeating, it’s because this has become something of a pattern here in Washington. Things look pretty grim for legislation in town these days, despite Democrats controlling the House, the Senate and the White House. Their margin for error is literally zero, and so hiccups from a half-dozen centrists can forewarn a doomed agenda. So far, Pelosi has been a master of holding the line on crucial votes and has managed to maneuver her team to victories, including on an earlier pandemic relief package that passed with only Democratic votes. Now she’s trying again, but the clock is ticking, and $3.5 trillion is an eye-popping sum of money that rivals the spending the United States unleashed to close out World War II. Attacks on Pharmaceutical Profits triggers Mod Dem Backlash – it disrupts unity. Cohen 9-6 Joshua Cohen 9-6-2021 "Democrats’ Plans To Introduce Prescription Drug Pricing Reform Face Formidable Obstacles" https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/09/06/democrats-plans-to-introduce-prescription-drug-pricing-reform-face-obstacles/?sh=37a269917395 (independent healthcare analyst with over 22 years of experience analyzing healthcare and pharmaceuticals.)Elmer There’s considerable uncertainty regarding passage with a simple majority of the 2021 massive budget reconciliation bill. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin called on Democrats to pause pushing forward the budget reconciliation bill. If Manchin winds up saying no to the bill, this would scuttle it as the Democrats can’t afford to lose a single Senator. And, there’s speculation that provisions to reduce prescription drug prices may be watered down and not incorporate international price referencing. Additionally, reduced prices derived through Medicare negotiation may not be able to be applied to those with employer-based coverage. While the progressive wing of the Democratic Party supports drug pricing reform, several key centrist Democrats in both the House and Senate appear to be uncomfortable with particular aspects of the budget reconciliation bill, including a potential deal-breaker, namely the potential negative impact of drug price controls on the domestic pharmaceutical industry, as well as long-term patient access to new drugs. A paper released in 2019 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the proposed legislation, H.R. 3, would reduce global revenue for new drugs by 19, leading to 8 fewer drugs approved in the U.S. between 2020 and 2029, and 30 fewer drugs over the next decade. And, a new report from the CBO reinforces the message that drug pricing legislation under consideration in Congress could lead to fewer new drugs being developed and launched. Intense lobbying efforts from biopharmaceutical industry groups are underway, warning of what they deem are harms from price controls in the form of diminished patient access to new innovations. The argument, based in part on assumptions and modeling included in the CBO reports, asserts that price controls would dampen investment critical to the biopharmaceutical industry’s pipeline of drugs and biologics. This won’t sway most Democrats, but has been a traditional talking point in the Republican Party for decades, and may convince some centrist Democrats to withdraw backing of provisions that in their eyes stymie pharmaceutical innovation. If the budget reconciliation bill would fail to garner a majority, a pared down version of H.R. 3, or perhaps a new bill altogether, with Senator Wyden spearheading the effort, could eventually land in the Senate. But, a similar set of provisos would apply, as majority support in both chambers would be far from a sure thing. In brief, Democrats’ plans at both the executive and legislative branch levels to introduce prescription drug pricing reform encounter challenges which may prevent impactful modifications from taking place. Sinema specifically jumps Ship. Hancock and Lucas 20 Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas 5-29-2020 "A Senator From Arizona Emerges As A Pharma Favorite" https://khn.org/news/a-senator-from-arizona-emerges-as-a-pharma-favorite/ (Senior Correspondent, joined KHN in 2012 from The Baltimore Sun, where he wrote a column on business and finance. Previously he covered the State Department and the economics beat for The Sun and health care for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and the Daily Press of Newport News. He has a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.)Elmer Sen. Kyrsten Sinema formed a congressional caucus to raise “awareness of the benefits of personalized medicine” in February. Soon after that, employees of pharmaceutical companies donated $35,000 to her campaign committee. Amgen gave $5,000. So did Genentech and Merck. Sanofi, Pfizer and Eli Lilly all gave $2,500. Each of those companies has invested heavily in personalized medicine, which promises individually tailored drugs that can cost a patient hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sinema is a first-term Democrat from Arizona but has nonetheless emerged as a pharma favorite in Congress as the industry steers through a new political and economic landscape formed by the coronavirus. She is a leading recipient of pharma campaign cash even though she’s not up for reelection until 2024 and lacks major committee or subcommittee leadership posts. For the 2019-20 election cycle through March, political action committees run by employees of drug companies and their trade groups gave her $98,500 in campaign funds, Kaiser Health News’ Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. That stands out in a Congress in which a third of the members got no pharma cash for the period and half of those who did got $10,000 or less. The contributions give companies a chance to cultivate Sinema as she restocks from a brutal 2018 election victory that cost nearly $25 million. Altogether, pharma PACs have so far given $9.2 million to congressional campaign chests in this cycle, compared with $9.4 million at this point in the 2017-18 period, a sustained surge as the industry has responded to complaints about soaring prices. Sinema’s pharma haul was twice that of Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in November, and approached that of fellow Democrat Steny Hoyer, the powerful House majority leader from Maryland. It all adds up to a bet by drug companies that the 43-year-old Sinema, first elected to the Senate in 2018, will gain influence in coming years and serve as an industry ally in a party that also includes many lawmakers harshly critical of high drug prices and the companies that set them. Pharma backlash independently turns Case. Huetteman 19 Emmarie Huetteman 2-26-2019 “Senators Who Led Pharma-Friendly Patent Reform Also Prime Targets For Pharma Cash” https://khn.org/news/senators-who-led-pharma-friendly-patent-reform-also-prime-targets-for-pharma-cash/ (former NYT Congressional correspondent with an MA in public affairs reporting from Northwestern University’s Medill School)Elmer Early last year, as lawmakers vowed to curb rising drug prices, Sen. Thom Tillis was named chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property rights, a committee that had not met since 2007. As the new gatekeeper for laws and oversight of the nation’s patent system, the North Carolina Republican signaled he was determined to make it easier for American businesses to benefit from it — a welcome message to the drugmakers who already leverage patents to block competitors and keep prices high. Less than three weeks after introducing a bill that would make it harder for generic drugmakers to compete with patent-holding drugmakers, Tillis opened the subcommittee’s first meeting on Feb. 26, 2019, with his own vow. “From the United States Patent and Trademark Office to the State Department’s Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, no department or bureau is too big or too small for this subcommittee to take interest,” he said. “And we will.” In the months that followed, tens of thousands of dollars flowed from pharmaceutical companies toward his campaign, as well as to the campaigns of other subcommittee members — including some who promised to stop drugmakers from playing money-making games with the patent system, like Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Tillis received more than $156,000 from political action committees tied to drug manufacturers in 2019, more than any other member of Congress, a new analysis of KHN’s Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee who worked side by side with Tillis, received more than $124,000 in drugmaker contributions last year, making him the No. 3 recipient in Congress. No. 2 was Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who took in about $139,000. As the Senate majority leader, he controls what legislation gets voted on by the Senate. Neither Tillis nor Coons sits on the Senate committees that introduced legislation last year to lower drug prices through methods like capping price increases to the rate of inflation. Of the four senators who drafted those bills, none received more than $76,000 from drug manufacturers in 2019. Tillis and Coons spent much of last year working on significant legislation that would expand the range of items eligible to be patented — a change that some experts say would make it easier for companies developing medical tests and treatments to own things that aren’t traditionally inventions, like genetic code. They have not yet officially introduced a bill. As obscure as patents might seem in an era of public outrage over drug prices, the fact that drugmakers gave most to the lawmakers working to change the patent system belies how important securing the exclusive right to market a drug, and keep competitors at bay, is to their bottom line. “Pharma will fight to the death to preserve patent rights,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug pricing. “Strong patent rights are central to the games drug companies play to extend their monopolies and keep prices high.” Campaign contributions, closely tracked by the Federal Election Commission, are among the few windows into how much money flows from the political groups of drugmakers and other companies to the lawmakers and their campaigns. Private companies generally give money to members of Congress to encourage them to listen to the companies, typically through lobbyists, whose activities are difficult to track. They may also communicate through so-called dark money groups, which are not required to report who gives them money. Over the past 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent about $233 million per year on lobbying, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. That is more than any other industry, including the oil and gas industry. Why Patents Matter Developing and testing a new drug, and gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Drugmakers are generally granted a six- or seven-year exclusivity period to recoup their investments. But drugmakers have found ways to extend that period of exclusivity, sometimes accumulating hundreds of patents on the same drug and blocking competition for decades. One method is to patent many inventions beyond a drug’s active ingredient, such as patenting the injection device that administers the drug. Keeping that arrangement intact, or expanding what can be patented, is where lawmakers come in. Lawmakers Dig In Tillis’ home state of North Carolina is also home to three major research universities and, not coincidentally, multiple drugmakers’ headquarters, factories and other facilities. From his swearing-in in 2015 to the end of 2018, Tillis received about $160,000 from drugmakers based there or beyond. He almost matched that four-year total in 2019 alone, in the midst of a difficult reelection campaign to be decided this fall. He has raised nearly $10 million for his campaign, with lobbyists among his biggest contributors, according to OpenSecrets. Daniel Keylin, a spokesperson for Tillis, said Tillis and Coons, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, are working to overhaul the country’s “antiquated intellectual property laws.” Keylin said the bipartisan effort protects the development and access to affordable, lifesaving medication for patients,” adding: “No contribution has any impact on how Tillis votes or legislates.” Tillis signaled his openness to the drug industry early on. The day before being named chairman, he reintroduced a bill that would limit the options generic drugmakers have to challenge allegedly invalid patents, effectively helping brand-name drugmakers protect their monopolies. Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), whose warm relationship with the drug industry was well-known, had introduced the legislation, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act, just days before his retirement in 2018. At his subcommittee’s first hearing, Tillis said the members would rely on testimony from private businesses to guide them. He promised to hold hearings on patent eligibility standards and “reforms to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.” In practice, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act would require generics makers challenging another drugmaker’s patent to either take their claim to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which acts as a sort of cheaper, faster quality check to catch bad patents, or file a lawsuit. A study released last year found that, since Congress created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in 2011, it has narrowed or overturned about 51 of the drugmaker patents that generics makers have challenged. Feldman said the drug industry “went berserk” over the number of patents the board changed and has been eager to limit use of the board as much as possible. Patent reviewers are often stretched thin and sometimes make mistakes, said Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug development. Limiting the ways to challenge patents, as Tillis’ bill would, does not strengthen the patent system, he said. “You want overlapping oversight for a system that is as important and fundamental as this system is,” he said. As promised, Tillis and Coons also spent much of the year working on so-called Section 101 reform regarding what is eligible to be patented — “a very major change” that “would overturn more than a century of Supreme Court law,” Feldman said. Sean Coit, Coons’ spokesperson, said lowering drug prices is one of the senator’s top priorities and pointed to Coon’s support for legislation the pharmaceutical industry opposes. “One of the reasons Senator Coons is leading efforts in Congress to fix our broken patent system is so that life-saving medicines can actually be developed and produced at affordable prices for every American,” Coit wrote in an email, adding that “his work on Section 101 reform has brought together advocates from across the spectrum, including academics and health experts.” In August, when much of Capitol Hill had emptied for summer recess, Tillis and Coons held closed-door meetings to preview their legislation to stakeholders, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, the brand-name drug industry’s lobbying group. “We regularly engage with members of Congress in both parties to advance practical policy solutions that will lower medicine costs for patients,” said Holly Campbell, a PhRMA spokesperson. Neither proposal has received a public hearing. In the 30 days before Tillis and Coons were named leaders of the revived subcommittee, drug manufacturers gave them $21,000 from their political action committees. In the 30 days following that first hearing, Tillis and Coons received $60,000. Among their donors were PhRMA; the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the biotech lobbying group; and five of the seven drugmakers whose executives — as Tillis laid out a pharma-friendly agenda for his new subcommittee — were getting chewed out by senators in a different hearing room over patent abuse. Cornyn Goes After Patent Abuse Richard Gonzalez, chief executive of AbbVie Inc., the company known for its top-selling drug, Humira, had spent the morning sitting stone-faced before the Senate Finance Committee as, one after another, senators excoriated him and six other executives of brand-name drug manufacturers over how they price their products. Cornyn brought up AbbVie’s more than 130 patents on Humira. Hadn’t the company blocked its competition? Cornyn asked Gonzalez, who carefully explained how AbbVie’s lawsuit against a generics competitor and subsequent licensing deal was not what he would describe as anti-competitive behavior. “I realize it may not be popular,” Gonzalez said. “But I think it is a reasonable balance.” A minute later, Cornyn turned to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who, like Cornyn, was also a member of the revived intellectual property subcommittee. This is worth looking into with “our Judiciary Committee authorities as well,” Cornyn said, effectively threatening legislation on patent abuse. The next day, Mylan, one of the largest producers of generic drugs, gave Cornyn $5,000, FEC records show. The company had not donated to Cornyn in years. By midsummer, every drug company that sent an executive to that hearing had given money to Cornyn, including AbbVie. Cornyn, who faces perhaps the most difficult reelection fight of his career this fall, ranks No. 6 among members of Congress in drugmaker PAC contributions last year, KHN’s analysis shows. He received about $104,000. Cornyn has received about $708,500 from drugmakers since 2007, KHN’s database shows. According to OpenSecrets, he has raised more than $17 million for this year’s reelection campaign. Cornyn’s office declined to comment. On May 9, Cornyn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which proposed to define two tactics used by drug companies to make it easier for the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute them: “product-hopping,” when drugmakers withdraw older versions of their drugs from the market to push patients toward newer, more expensive ones, and “patent-thicketing,” when drugmakers amass a series of patents to drag out their exclusivity and slow rival generics makers, who must challenge those patents to enter the market once the initial exclusivity ends. PhRMA opposed the bill. The next day, it gave Cornyn $1,000. Cornyn and Blumenthal’s bill would have been “very tough on the techniques that pharmaceutical companies use to extend patent protections and to keep prices high,” Feldman said. “The pharmaceutical industry lobbied tooth and nail against it,” she said. “And when the bill finally came out of committee, the strongest provisions — the patent-thicketing provisions — had been stripped.” In the months after the bill cleared committee and waited to be taken up by the Senate, Cornyn blamed Senate Democrats for blocking the bill while trying to secure votes on legislation with more direct controls on drug prices. The Senate has not voted on the bill. Infrastructure reform solves Existential Climate Change – it results in spill-over. USA Today 7-20 7-20-2021 "Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2021/07/20/climate-change-biden-infrastructure-bill-good-start/7877118002/Elmer Not long ago, climate change for many Americans was like a distant bell. News of starving polar bears or melting glaciers was tragic and disturbing, but other worldly. Not any more. Top climate scientists from around the world warned of a "code red for humanity" in a report issued Monday that says severe, human-caused global warming is become unassailable. Proof of the findings by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a now a factor of daily life. Due to intense heat waves and drought, 107 wildfires – including the largest ever in California – are now raging across the West, consuming 2.3 million acres. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people died in unprecedented triple-digit heat in Oregon, Washington and western Canada, when a "heat dome" of enormous proportions settled over the region for days. Some victims brought by stretcher into crowded hospital wards had body temperatures so high, their nervous systems had shut down. People collapsed trying to make their way to cooling shelters. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases Scientists say the event was almost certainly made worse and more intransigent by human-caused climate change. They attribute it to a combination of warming Arctic temperatures and a growing accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The consequences of what mankind has done to the atmosphere are now inescapable. Periods of extreme heat are projected to double in the lower 48 states by 2100. Heat deaths are far outpacing every other form of weather killer in a 30-year average. A persistent megadrought in America's West continues to create tinder-dry conditions that augur another devastating wildfire season. And scientists say warming oceans are fueling ever more powerful storms, evidenced by Elsa and the early arrival of hurricane season this year. Increasingly severe weather is causing an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States every year. "It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Rising seas from global warming Investigators are still trying to determine what led to the collapse of a Miami-area condominium that left more than 100 dead or missing. But one concerning factor is the corrosive effect on reinforced steel structures of encroaching saltwater, made worse in Florida by a foot of rising seas from global warming since the 1900s. The clock is ticking for planet Earth. While the U.N. report concludes some level of severe climate change is now unavoidable, there is still a window of time when far more catastrophic events can be mitigated. But mankind must act soon to curb the release of heat-trapping gases. Global temperature has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century. Scientists warn that in a decade, it could surpass a 2.7-degree increase. That's enough warming to cause catastrophic climate changes. After a brief decline in global greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, pollution is on the rise. Years that could have been devoted to addressing the crisis were wasted during a feckless period of inaction by the Trump administration. Congress must act Joe Biden won the presidency promising broad new policies to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions. But Congress needs to act on those ideas this year. Democrats cannot risk losing narrow control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2022 elections to a Republican Party too long resistant to meaningful action on the climate. So what's at issue? A trillion dollar infrastructure bill negotiated between Biden and a group of centrist senators (including 10 Republicans) is a start. In addition to repairing bridges, roads and rails, it would improve access by the nation's power infrastructure to renewable energy sources, cap millions of abandoned oil and gas wells spewing greenhouse gases, and harden structures against climate change. It also offers tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and funds the construction of charging stations. (The nation's largest source of climate pollution are gas-powered vehicles.) Senate approval could come very soon. Much more is needed if the nation is going to reach Biden's necessary goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution in half from 2005 levels by 2030. His ideas worth considering include a federal clean electricity standard for utilities, federal investments and tax credits to promote renewable energy, and tens of billions of dollars in clean energy research and development, including into ways of extracting greenhouse gases from the skies. Another idea worth considering is a fully refundable carbon tax. The vehicle for these additional proposals would be a second infrastructure bill. And if Republicans balk at the cost of such vital investment, Biden is rightly proposing to pass this package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows bills to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote. These are drastic legislative steps. But drastic times call for them. And when Biden attends a U.N. climate conference in November, he can use American progress on climate change as a mean of persuading others to follow our lead. Further delay is not an option.
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SeptOct - K - SetCol
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy Genocidal settlement is a structure, not an event meaning ontological logic of elimination is an everyday manifestation that defines settler identity. Rifkin 14, Mark. Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. U of Minnesota Press, 2014. (Associate Professor of English and WGS at UNC-Greensboro)Elmer If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that “elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded) occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the domination and displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation as a white possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “At an ontological level the structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and manage- ment: “the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix). That results in land exploitation and ecocide – specifically manifests in knowledge institutions making forefronting Settler Colonialism a prior question. Paperson 17 la paperson or K. Wayne Yang, June 2017, “A Third University is Possible” (an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego)Elmer Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism, contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not only to seize and exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism thus complicates the center–periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein an imperial center, the “metropole,” dominates distant colonies, the “periphery.” Typically, one thinks of European colonization of Africa, India, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and human beings are recast as natural resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt, seeds, genetic material, chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006.2 However, the analysis of settler colonialism is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire.3 The critical literatures of the colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in global arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized for its diagnoses of anti/colonial violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and Indigenous relations.4 Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to Indigenous people. This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler colonialism, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were a past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler colonialism is something that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of why directs us to think of land tenancy laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder and disappearance. Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This separation, what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/land” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal: who will be moved where, who will be murdered how, who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom.5 In the alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness. Moreover, it is not just human beings who are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a move that first alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies required to create and maintain these separations, these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from nonhuman, land from life.6 “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonization. Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you might consider settler colonialism as a set of technologies —a frame that could help you to forecast colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. This chapter proceeds with the following insights. (1) The settler–native– slave triad does not describe identities. The triad—an analytic mainstay of settler colonial studies—digs a pitfall of identity that not only chills collaborations but also implies that the racial will be the solution. (2) Technologies are trafficked. Technologies generate patterns of social relations to land. Technologies mutate, and so do these relationships. Colonial technologies travel. In tracing technologies’ past and future trajectories, we can connect how settler colonial and antiblack technologies circulate in transnational arenas. (3) Land—not just people—is the biopolitical target.7 The examples are many: fracking, biopiracy, damming of rivers and flooding of valleys, the carcasses of pigs that die from the feed additive ractopamine and are allowable for harvest by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support “human” life is a “biopolitics” well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, “human” subject. (4) (Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master, that our theory has a Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Othered studies have already made their breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation). (5) Even when they are dangerous, understanding technologies provides us some pathways for decolonizing work. We can identify projects of collaboration on decolonial technologies. Colonizing mechanisms are evolving into new forms, and they might be subverted toward decolonizing operations. The Settler–Native–Slave Triad Does Not Describe Identities One of the main interventions of settler colonial studies has been to insist that the patterning of social relations is shaped by colonialism’s thirst for land and thus is shaped to fit modes of empire. Because colonialism is a perverted affair, our relationships are also warped into complicitous arrangements of violation, trespass, and collusion with its mechanisms. For Fanon, the psychosis of colonialism arises from the patterning of violence into the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the impugned humanity of the native. For Fanon, the supremacist “right” to create settler space that is immune from violence, and the “right” to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism. Furthermore, the “humanity” of the settler is constructed upon his agency over the land and nature. As Maldonado- Torres explains, “I think, therefore I am” is actually an articulation of “I conquer, therefore I am,” a sense of identity posited upon the harnessing of nature and its “natural” people.8 This creates a host of post+colonial problems that have come to define modernity. Because the humanity of the settler is predicated on his ability to “write the world,” to make history upon and over the natural world, the colonized is instructed to make her claim to humanity by similarly acting on the world or, more precisely, acting in his. Indeed, for Fanon, it is the perverse ontology of settler becomings—becoming landowner or becoming property, becoming killable or becoming a killer—and the mutual implication of tortured and torturer that mark the psychosis of colonialism. This problem of modernity and colonial psychosis is echoed in Jack Forbes’s writings: Columbus was a wétiko. He was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. . . . The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko.9 Under Western modernity, becoming “free” means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, “the central contradiction of modernity is freedom.”10 Critiques of settler colonialism, therefore, do not offer just another “type” of colonialism to add to the literature but a mode of analysis that has repercussions for any diagnosis of coloniality and for understanding the modern conditions of freedom. By modern conditions of freedom, I mean that Western freedom is a product of colonial modernity, and I mean that such freedom comes with conditions, with strings attached, most manifest as terms of unfreedom for nonhumans. As Cindi Mayweather says, “your freedom’s in a bind.”11 Expansion of medical access is a form of settler colonial biomedical onslaught – humanitarian promotions of health proliferate genocidal assimilation. Klausen 13, Jimmy Casas. "Reservations on hospitality: contact and vulnerability in Kant and indigenous action." Hospitality and World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013. 197-221. (Associate Professor in the Instituto de Relações Internacionais at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)Elmer On the other hand and by contrast, the governmental reach of public health initiatives that would effect the improvement of isolated indigenous populations’ health accords with Kantian philanthropy – with all the risks of violated freedom and smothered life that entails. Public health advocates would repair the disadvantaged morbidity profile of isolated indigenous groups through a policy of initiating contact supported by the provision of modern biomedical health care services to ameliorate the epidemiological effects of contact. State-initiated contact without attendant health care has proved disastrous. Into the 1970s, FUNAI attempted to make friendly contact with isolated Indians. By relying on hired expert indigenous trackers, government contact expeditions located isolated groups and – demonstrating their interest in seeking commerce – enticed the latter with gifts of machetes and blankets. One FUNAI expedition to contact the Matis in 1978 resulted in high morbidity from pneumonia and other infectious diseases and killed one of every two Matis. 60 To correct such devastating policies, anthropologists Magdalena Hurtado, Kim Hill, Hillard Kaplan and Jane Lancaster have elaborated the following argument: Many anthropologists and indigenous-rights activists believe that uncontacted Indians should be left alone. These people are well-meaning, but they are wrong because they base their position on three incorrect assumptions. First, they assume that the Indians have chosen to remain isolated . . . . Those who oppose contact also assume that the Indians will inevitably be decimated by virgin-soil epidemics . . . . Finally, opponents of contact assume that isolated native groups will survive if not contacted. 61 However, even correcting for the fatal infelicities of past policy-driven, state-initiated contacts such as FUNAI’s, the preponderantly disadvantaged morbidity profile of such virgin-soil populations cannot be reduced by greater hospitality in the form of redoubled and more expert interventionary contacts. Although public health efforts like those advocated by Hurtado et al. might reduce mortality, highly disease-vulnerable persons will still sicken and will do so through means that would pretend to foster life by actively disregarding how the people subject to these external machinations might determine their own needs and value their own health. Isolated indigenes’ biological lives would be simultaneously fostered and risked, while their free personhood would count as nothing morally–culturally. In short, there are serious political costs to be weighed in such an intervention. Because of – and not in spite of – their philanthropy, public health interventions of the type that Hurtado et al. advocate extend the reach of governmentality much more intrusively than land rights policies. Besides deciding on behalf of peoples in regard to the interpretation of their acts of self-quarantine, the advocated public health policies surgically insert apparatuses of biomedicine directly into the contacted peoples’ living being. Such policies thereby displace indigenous norms of health and native cultural strategies of living on with the norms and overall strategy embedded in the culture of scientific and clinical biomedicine. Though the pretence is that such acts demonstrate the hospitality of the wider national or global society, such health policy interventions cannot simply make a presentation for possible society; rather, qua philanthropy they initiate contact, which, because of the high degree of vulnerability of those contacted, must needs lead to the proliferation of contacts. It is not a hospitable policy of fostering life that Hurtado et al. support, not merely possible commerce but an obsessive philanthropy of biomedical life support and literally unavoidable onslaught of commerce, possibly forevermore. Most startlingly, such public health interventions presume as universal a standard of life that could certainly vary while retaining meaning and value. The anthropologist Tess Lea describes this universalising interventionary compulsion in withering words: When you are a helping bureau-professional, the compulsion to do something to fix the problems of target populations – those deemed as suffering from unequal and preventable conditions – exceeds all other impulses . . . . ‘They’ need our greater commitment. The idea that life might be lived differently with value and meaning or that ‘need’ might be conceived differently from the way in which we calculate it through our interventionary lens, becomes impossible to imagine. 62 Hurtado et al. assume that health professionals and policy makers must hospitably confer biomedically acquired immunity on heretofore isolated and now contacted virgin soil populations. Fostering indigenous lives by imposing an alien conception of immunity, they would inhospitably destroy alternate strategies of living on. Seeing through their interventionary lens, Hurtado et al. themselves become arbiters of successful and unsuccessful forms of life: they presume that self-quarantine cannot itself serve as an effective cultural strategy to immunise living bodies. Thus, ironically perhaps, these anthropologists choose biology above culture by seeing each from a standpoint authorised by the culture of biomedicine. From their interventionary lens and against Canguilhem’s admonition above, self-quarantine appears to be a failed strategy for living on because the immunity it would confer is imperfect or incomplete. Likewise, condoning self-isolation is imperfect or incomplete hospitality as against their more perfect interventionary hospitality in the name of life. Authorising themselves to make these judgements, they enact an altogether different collapse of morality into nature than the Kantian collapse I reconstruct above. Whereas Kant’s collapse of minimalism into abstentionism and moral duty into nature’s constraints opens hospitality and therefore strategies for living on, this other collapse binds moralising conceptions of ‘health’ to the biomedically conceived body. Yet if, according to Canguilhem, for humans especially, ‘health is precisely a certain latitude, a certain play in the norms of life and behavior’, 63 then it seems that the ‘health’ that supposedly hospitable, though strictly philanthropic, ‘life’-fostering interventionary contact would impose on the exuberance of self-quarantining indigenous peoples is a sickness unto that other perpetual peace Kant mentions: death. Biomedicine itself is invested in colonial exploitation through testing done on indigenous communities to biopiracy and stealing indigenous knowledge. Lift Mode 17 3-10-2017 "Pharmaceutical Colonialism” https://medium.com/@liftmode/pharmaceutical-colonialism-3-ways-that-western-medicine-takes-from-indigenous-communities-3a9339b4f24f (We at Liftmode.com are a team of professionals from a variety of backgrounds, dedicated to the mission of providing the highest quality and highest purity nutritional health supplements on the market. We look specifically for the latest and most promising research in the fields of cognition enhancement, neuroscience and alternative health supplements, and develop commercial strategies to bring these technologies to the marketplace.)Elmer Does modern medicine take from rural communities? At first, this seems outrageous. However, on closer inspection, we find three main methods of poaching: stealing indigenous knowledge, ‘biopiracy’, and the sale of pharmaceuticals at exorbitant prices. Another example includes using developing countries and rural populations as test subjects in unethical clinical trials — for example on AIDS patients in South Africa.1 This article examines three methods that Western medicine takes from rural communities. We also examine the emerging new forms of medicine and how many people are beginning to appreciate the medical knowledge of different cultures around the world. Traditional knowledge and culture is threatened by the expansive natural of the pharmaceutical industry 1. Pharmaceutical colonialism: Stealing Indigenous Knowledge First and foremost, what has been taken from indigenous communities for the last roughly 600 years is traditional knowledge about medicinal plants. It is interesting that the major advancements in Western medicine coincide very closely to escalating global colonialism by Western countries. It’s difficult to estimate the exact percentage of modern drugs that were originally based on traditional plant sources, because of the complex evolution of Western laboratory-made medicine. However, this percentage is known to be very high. In fact, a 2006 paper by Dr. A Gurib-Fakim states: “Natural products and their derivatives represent more than 50 of all the drugs in clinical use in the world. Higher plants contribute no less than 25 of the total.”2 The extent to which traditional knowledge permeates through Western medicine is too broad to explain fully in a small article like this. We’d need to write an entire book to cover the full content! So, we will just take a look at one example below. How the West takes Indigenous knowledge: Anti-Malaria Drugs Mosquitoes are, by far, the world’s most dangerous animals, spreading a number of diseases including Dengue fever, Zika virus, and malaria. According to the World Health Organization, nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria. In 2015, over 210 million people became infected with malaria, and a staggering 429 000 people died from the blood parasite.3 To combat the infectious disease, scientists have developed two major classes of anti-malarial drugs. These are both based on indigenous knowledge of plant medicine: Mosquitos kill more people than any other animal every year 1. Quinine Quinine is extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America. Contrary to propaganda by the Spanish inquisitors, which is still used in modern medicine today, Westerners did not ‘discover’ the cinchona tree. Indigenous Peruvian cultures had been using the bark of the cinchona tree for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years before the arrival of the colonial forces from the North. They crushed it up and mixed it with water to ‘relieve shivering’ — a major sign of the feverish symptoms of malaria.4 Unlike traditional Chinese knowledge, which has survived until modern times, the ancient knowledge of South America cultures was almost completely destroyed by colonial forces. This makes tracing the historical use of the cinchona tree more difficult.5 After the inquisition of most traditional cultures in South America, the cinchona bark was brought back to Western Europe and was hailed as one of the most exciting discoveries of modern medicine. The success of cinchona bark in Europe created a massive industry, initially run by the Spanish, but which was later overtaken by French and English industrialists.6 It’s important to know that the ‘traditional’ use of cinchona bark in 18th century Europe was in exactly the same method as its original use in indigenous societies: crushing up the barking and mixing it with water. The chemical compound quinine was first extracted from cinchona bark in 1820 by two Frenchmen: Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou. This allowed purified quinine to replace traditional cinchona extracts.7 Interestingly, Western scientists have since discovered that cinchona bark actually contains several active components, which function in a synergistic relationship to kill the malaria parasite.8 In modern times, a number of quinine-based drugs have been developed, with varying success. The issue becomes complex here because, while these drugs were developed by Western scientists using modern technological laboratories, if it hadn’t been for the original indigenous knowledge, these compounds could not have been developed at all. The quinine derivatives include Chloroquine, Pyrimethamine, and Mefloquine. Chloroquine was used as a spray along with DDT in the WHO’s malaria eradication plan (the efficacy and usefulness of this are still under debate: numerous countries that were sprayed with these chemicals soon developed strains of malaria that were resistant to the drugs).9 60411828 - workers are fogging for dengue control. mosquito borne diseases of zika virus. Quinine-based drugs were used in sprays to combat malaria around the world 2. Artemisinin Artemisinin is an active compound found in traditional Chinese medicine called Qinghao Su (sweet wormwood). This traditional Chinese medicine has been used to treat fevers for over a thousand years. It is currently still extracted from plant sources, the majority of which are grown in China, Vietnam and East Africa. Once the full-grown plants are harvested, the chemical is extracted, leaving the pure artemisinin at a highly variable market price of between $120 — $1200 per kilogram.10 It’s interesting that the artemisinin-based drug combinations (ACTs) are the most expensive anti-malarial treatments available. This is despite the fact that it is one of the few malarial medications that are still mostly plant-based. However, Western pharmaceutical companies are now developing synthetic forms of artemisinin. The new forms of artemsinin are genetically engineered and have intellectual property rights attached, potentially bringing in big revenues for the companies involved. The proponents of the synthetic form of artemisinin claim that the synthetic form will be able to be sold for cheaper than the natural form. However, the average import price of natural artemsisin to India over the last ten years was around $370 per kilo — a fair amount cheaper than the price that the pharmaceutical companies are pushing for.11 Artemisinin farming sustains the livelihoods of an estimated 100’000 farmers. With synthetic derivatives being developed this puts the livelihoods of the farmers and their families at risk of poverty (estimated to be around 3–5 times the number of people as the farmers themselves).12 The ironic and disturbing thing about the whole situation is that the artemisinin farmers themselves are the ones who are most at risk of contracting malaria. In effect, they stand to not only have their incomes stripped by Western pharmaceutical companies but also to become physically dependent on the products of those very companies. 13 16118463 - portrait of a burmese woman with thanaka powdered face working in farm Farmers livelihoods are threatened by the use of synthetic chemicals 2. ‘Biopiracy’ — stealing natural resources and plants The idea that modern medicine might be a form of colonialism seems at first to be quite outrageous! However, on closer inspection, it’s quite clear that a few nations continue to play the role of ‘missionary’, helping to save people in the ‘developing world’.14 In some cases, though, the role of the ‘missionary’ becomes a little less clear. The second way that Western medicine takes from indigenous communities is something called ‘Biopiracy’. This is similar to the method we described above, however, in this case, what is taken is not knowledge but the actual plants and resources themselves. In biopiracy actions, plants and natural resources are stolen entirely from indigenous communities and are then used to develop drugs and medicines in the West. The indigenous communities benefit nothing from the theft of their resources. Medicines developed from stolen materials are often sold back to the very people from whom the original plant-sources were stolen — at exorbitant prices. Examples of medications that face biopiracy charges include: A drug for diabetes developed in the UK from a Libyan plant, Artemisia judaica A medicine for immunosuppression developed by GlaxoSmithKline which is derived from a chemical found in termite hills in Gambia An HIV treatment taken from bacteria found in central Uganda Antibiotic drugs developed from amoebas found in Mauritius and Venezuela Anti-diarrhea vaccines developed from Egyptian bacteria 15 According to Beth Burrows, president of Washington-based Edmond’s Institute: “Times have changed. It is no longer acceptable for the great white explorer to trawl across Africa or South America taking what they want for their own commercial benefit. It is no more than a new form of colonial pillaging. As there are internationally recognized rights for oil, so there should be for indigenous plants and knowledge.”16 In an ideal world, knowledge and resources would be shared equitably. Both the indigenous cultures and the modern world would benefit from the sharing of knowledge and medicinal plants, which could leave the world a much better place. However, this is not the case in today’s world. More and more, we see evidence of pharmaceutical companies using rural communities as customers and guinea-pigs for medicine that was originally sourced from local knowledge.17 Traditional medicine is pushed off the market and indigenous knowledge is ‘dumbed down’ through development programs. This forces the majority of the world to have to work through cartel-like pharmaceutical corporations who extract unbelievably large sums of money from people, which we’ll look at below.18 21736635 - shanty house in bangkok water canals along the river bank, thailand Those who benefit the least from pharmaceutical colonialism are the ones who need healthcare the most Vote negative to endorse a cartography of refusal Day 15 Iyko, Associate Professor of English. Chair, Critical Social Thought. “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique.” Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 102-121 Elmer And so the potential relations that Wilderson sets up through a critique of sovereignty are at best irrelevant or at worse false in Sexton’s absolute claim that slavery stands alone as the “threshold of the political world.”45 I suggest that this wavering relation/nonrelation of antiblackness and Indigeneity exhibited in Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work reveal the problem in any totalizing approach to the heterogeneous constitution of racial difference in settler colonies. Beyond this inconsistency, the liberal multiculturalist agenda that Wilderson and Sexton project into Indigenous sovereignty willfully evacuates any Indigenous refusal of a colonial politics of recognition. Among other broad strokes, Sexton states, “as a rule, Native Studies reproduces the dominant liberal political narrative of emancipation and enfranchisement.”46 This provides a basis for Wilderson’s assertion that Indigenous sovereignty engages in a liberal politics of state legitimation through recognition because “treaties are forms of articulation” that buttress “the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit genocidal) idea.”47 But such a depoliticized liberal project is frankly incompatible with Indigenous activism and scholarship that emerges from Native studies in North America. The main argument in Glen Sean Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks is to categorically reject “the liberal recognition-based approach to Indigenous selfdetermination.”48 This is not a politics of legitimizing Indigenous nations through state recognition but rather one of refusal, a refusal to be recognized and thus interpellated by the settler colonial nation-state. Drawing on Fanon, Coulthard describes the “necessity on the part of the oppressed to ‘turn away’ from their other-oriented master-dependency, and to instead struggle for freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values.”49 It is also difficult to reconcile the depoliticized narrative of “resurgence and recovery” that Wilderson and Sexton attribute to Indigenous sovereignty in the face of Idle No More, the anticapitalist Indigenous sovereignty movement in Canada whose national railway and highway blockades have seriously destabilized the expropriation of natural resources for the global market. These are examples that Coulthard describes as “direct action” rather tjhan negotiation—in other words, antagonism, not conflict resolution: The blockades are a crucial act of negation insofar as they seek to impede or block the flow of resources currently being transported to international markets from oil and gas fields, refineries, lumber mills, mining operations, and hydroelectric facilities located on the dispossessed lands of Indigenous nations. These modes of direct action . . . seek to have a negative impact on the economic infrastructure that is core to the colonial accumulation of capital in settler-political economies like Canada’s.50 These tactics are part of what Audra Simpson calls a “cartography of refusal” that “negates the authority of the other’s gaze.”51 It is impossible to frame the blockade movement, which has become the greatest threat to Canada’s resource agenda,52 as a struggle for “enfranchisement.” Idle No More is not in “conflict” with the Canadian nation-state; it is in a struggle against the very premise of settler colonial capitalism that requires the elimination of Indigenous peoples. As Coulthard states unambiguously, “For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die.”
9/18/21
SeptOct - T - Medicine
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Interlake DB | Judge: Jayanne Forrest Interpretation: Medicines effect disease Merriam Webster “Medicine” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medicine 1a : a substance or preparation used in treating disease cough medicine. Violation: Music doesn’t do that No I meet – They need to read specific evidence to overcome ideological preference
Vote neg for limits and ground – an unstable stasis point for contestation explodes the amount of Affs on this topic from 5 to anything that could arbitrarily be related to medicine. That moots all negative ground predicated on current domestic and international issues around intellectual property, and medicines for treatment. Topic disads like innovation, biotech, and even generics like Cap are mooted because the aff can always say “not our IPR” since no one says music = medicine.
TVA – Read an aff that reduces IP Protections for Medicines that indigenous tribes use. Allows for the thesis of the aff, while still centering the debate around a medicine which is the best middle ground.
Independently, they’re extra topical because they fiat ceding to indigenous tribes which includes both words and actions outside of the res. That’s a voting issue because it lets them tack on endless things to a “topical” plan which moots negative ground that is based on resolutional stasis.
Fairness is an impact – A It’s an intrinsic good – some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity – if it didn’t exist, then there wouldn’t be value to the game since judges could literally vote whatever way they wanted regardless of the competing arguments made B Probability – your ballot can’t solve their impacts but it can solve mine – debate can’t alter subjectivity, but can rectify skews
Paradigm Issues – a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
9/11/21
SeptOct - T - WTO
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy Interp – topical affs must fiat an action through the World Trade Organization. Member nations of the WTO make policies as a whole – WTO ND (World Trade Organization) “What is the WTO?” https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/whatis_e.htm BC The WTO is run by its member governments. All major decisions are made by the membership as a whole, either by ministers (who usually meet at least once every two years) or by their ambassadors or delegates (who meet regularly in Geneva). Nation and state are synonymous Merriam Webster ND “nation” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nation BC Definition of nation (Entry 1 of 2) 1a(1): NATIONALITY sense 5athree Slav peoples … forged into a Yugoslavia without really fusing into a Yugoslav nation— Hans Kohn (2): a politically organized nationality (3)in the Bible : a non-Jewish nationality why do the nations conspire— Psalms 2:1 (Revised Standard Version) b: a community of people composed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory and government Canada is a nation with a written constitution— B. K. Sandwell c: a territorial division containing a body of people of one or more nationalities and usually characterized by relatively large size and independent status a nation of vast size with a small population— Mary K. Hammond
Violation – they don’t – EU member states are distinct from WTO member nations Prefer 1 Ground – justifies affs about any country reducing any IP protection on medicine – only our interp ensures link magnitude by ensuring it is an international reduction for IPP for medicine which is key to generics like the innovation DA, WTO bad, consult the WHO, and the IP NC -- privileges the aff by stretching pre-tournament neg prep too thin and precluding nuanced rigorous testing of aff. 2 Topic ed – WTO patent wavers are the core topic controversy – their aff is just domestic policy passed in European Union Member states. Proven by their second advantage – none of their internal links are about medical trade secrets which proves their interpretation is a cheap way of getting a relations impact about any two countries that does trade – justifies the US-Mexico or China-Japan aff. Outweighs aff flex -- prep is determined by the lit and we only have 2 months to debate the topic and it provides better link magnitude to all your generics because this is the statis point the topic is centered around. 3 Precision - even if all EU member states are in the WTO that doesn’t mean all WTO member nations are in the EU – prefer our interp – we have evidence from the WTO that explains what coordinated action looks like. 4 Paradigm Issues – a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
9/18/21
SeptOct - Th - Spec - Tribal Influence
Tournament: Grapevine Classic | Round: 5 | Opponent: McNeil | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo Interp – The aff must specify the influence and decision-making powers of tribal authorities over implementation of the plan in tribal lands in a delineated text in the 1AC. Violation – they dotn
Ambiguity is a tool for settlers to define the terms of engagement with tribes. The liberal intentions of the 1AC don’t matter—absent defined standards, the policies will reproduce colonial domination. Steinman ’12 Steinman, Erich. “Settler Colonial Power and the American Indian Sovereignty Movement: Forms of Domination, Strategies of Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology Vol. 117, No. 4, January 2012, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662708. PeteZ A traditional definition of "sovereignty" is: "The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which any independent state is governed."' 3 Questions regarding the sovereign rights of tribes are often the starting point of any federal Indian law issue. Although the whole of federal Indian law is quite complex,14 the essence of tribal sovereignty is simply the extent to which a tribe can attend to its own affairs and control its own cultural, societal, and economic development free from outside restraints. Under the current legal and political regimes, the extent of tribal control is ambiguous. The Handbook of Federal Indian Law lists three "fundamental principles" that demonstrate the anomalous and restricted nature of tribal sovereignty: (1) Indian tribes possess all the powers of a sovereign state; (2) conquest renders the tribes subject, however, to the legislative authority of the United States and terminates the tribes' external sovereign powers, but does not affect the internal sovereign powers of the tribes; and (3) these powers are subject to qualification by treaties and congressional legislation.' 5 Cohen's three principles demonstrate the dichotomy between internal and external sovereignty16 that pervades the concept of tribal sovereignty. Tribes are supposedly full sovereigns with respect to their own internal affairs and interests. At the same time, however, the United States government has completely extinguished their external sovereign powers.17 This state of affairs might not be problematic if defined standards for maintaining the relationship between the tribal and federal governments existed and the relationship were based upon the consent of the tribes. The history of tribal-federal relations demonstrates, however, that neither standards nor consent exist, and that the relationship is uncertain at best. Tribal-federal relations have periodically oscillated between two diametrically opposed views on the status of Indian Tribes. At one end of the spectrum is the belief that tribes are independent political communities and should control their own development.'8 At the other end lies the belief that the tribal system should be dismantled and individual Indians should be assimilated into the greater American society.19 While these views appear to be in extreme conflict, their implementation produces very similar results. The United States government dominates the tribal-federal relationship, allowing it to manipulate the situation to protect federal interests. The following historical background will demonstrate how the lack of definition and consent in the relationship promotes federal dominance. Vote neg— 1 – Critical Education – The policymaking process is not innocent. Force them to study how their practice of fiat can itself reproduce settler colonialism. For tribes, these details are life and death. 2 – Ground – Tribal sovereignty is the first question in any debate about policies that affect natives – avoiding it is unfair, irresponsible, and bad for education. 3 – Presumption – If their framing is right, then the state will always manipulate its policies to screw over tribes – you should presume no sovereignty. 4 – CX doesn’t check: (A) My interp forces them to research these issues before round. (B) I can’t prep a strat against their aff until CX. (C) Footnoting DA—reduces crucial issues of sovereignty to a mere afterthought. (D) Specifying sovereignty should be the default—I shouldn’t have to ask.
Fairness is a voter and comes first – A debate’s a game that requires effective competition and negation, which makes their offense inevitable, it internal link turns clash and engagement. Education – it’s the only portable impact to debate CI – a) brightlines are arbitrary and self-serving which doesn’t set good norms b) it collapses since weighing between brightlines rely on offense defense DTD – a) it’s the only way to may up for time spent on theory b) it’s the only way to deter future abuse No RVI’s- a) logic – you shouldn’t win for being fair b) clash – people go all in on theory which decks substance engagement c) chilling effect – people will be too scared to read theory because RVI’s encourage baiting theory