I'll address that and then get back to the question around New Zealand.
First of all, I think you raised an important point. We want to make sure that the drugs that are coming to market are in fact safe and effective. One of the most concerning trends is the trend towards notice of compliance with conditions, an NOC/c, which is basically a conditional licensing. So early trials are promising but not good enough, or there's not enough data collected to establish the actual safety and effectiveness, but we'll license it anyhow and hope that the risks are minor in the real world.
I'm an economist. I study industrial organization and innovation policy. I think the mechanism to promote competition that we would want, and innovation that we would want, is to continue to maintain high standards at the regulatory level and in fact perhaps raise the bar. I think the bar has been lowered slightly through processes that we've heard about today. In exchange for that, I would argue that we need to reconsider our patent laws and reconsider or reopen the debate around patent term restoration. That's a debate that's well beyond the subject of this discussion today, but I think it's something we need to discuss. It's certainly going on internationally.
The Office of Fair Trading in the U.K. has put out a number of interesting recommendations to that effect, and the U.S. is constantly debating what's referred to as patent term restoration, which is basically giving a longer patent in exchange for longer clinical trials, because effectively the patent is useless in some sense until the product is on the market. But we can talk about that later.
I want to touch on the issue with respect to New Zealand. The New Zealand formulary has fewer “drugs” on the market. They also have fewer different dosage sizes, packaging, and what not than Canada does. We actually have a proliferation, if you will, of different packages, strengths, and dosages of roughly speaking the same chemicals. If you were to take the formularies and look at them at a therapeutic or chemical level, you'd find they're actually quite comparable.
New Zealand has made no decisions around very controversial drugs, like the COX-2 inhibitors such as Vioxx. On the whole, it actually has a fairly comprehensive formulary.