LAST EDITED ON Jun-03-03 AT 08:22 PM (EDT)
 
Actually -- and I hope I don't come across as super agumentative -- but the "R&D argument" is a major fallacy that's been re-treaded time and time again during the AIDS crisis. It doesn't hold up.

Drug companies spend a whole lot more on advertising and marketing than they do on R&D. If you want to see how pharm companies spend their money, go here: http://csdd.tufts.edu/ and here http://www.familiesusa.org/site/PageServer. One's an industry site and the other is a consumer site so the truth is somewhere down the middle.

Before you can cure a disease, you need to control it, and the best way to control AIDS is to increase prvention through education, and to make cheap AIDS-fighting drugs (or better yet, the means to produce those drugs) avaiable to the nations with the biggest AIDS problems (and that's usually the poor ones).

If the R&D argument held water, we'd have a cure for cancer, a cure for the common cold, a cure for Herpes, etc. Some diseases take an incredibly LONG time to cure, and you have to have workable solutions in the meantime.