Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Tahir Amin of Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) Is Helping To Change Our World
It is not always how much you know, it is how you say it. I have learned that you can have all the knowledge and technical information in the world, but without an effective grasp of how to communicate it in a way that the larger public can understand is going to limit your effectiveness as an advocate.
As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tahir Amin.
Tahir Amin is the co-founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a global nonprofit organization that works to lower drug prices. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I began my career in law as an intellectual property (IP) attorney in the mid 1990s, where I worked for two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and then served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. As corporations moved from manufacturing to becoming knowledge based, brand and services focused, IP was fast becoming their primary asset. At the time I started practicing, IP was considered a “sexy” area of the law given it was an emerging field that few knew much about. It was at the heart of globalisation that would shape the economy and society over the next two decades in so many ways. The experience of working on the corporate side of IP allowed me to see firsthand how and who gets to implement and shape laws. Representing large corporations, I was one of an army of lawyers protecting their interests and assets, helping to privatise knowledge as property, while simultaneously shaping IP laws in their interests through the attrition of administrative actions at the Patent and Trademark Office level, litigation and policy briefs. After about a decade and accepting that the law was more often about who had the deepest pockets and power than the best legal arguments, I gave up my path to partnership, sold my apartment and belongings and moved to India. I joined a small public interest legal organisation called the Alternative Law Forum, which looked at how intellectual property laws were enclosing the public commons and would impact the Global South.
My arrival in India was at a time when the globalisation of IP was taking hold there as well as the rest of the Global South due to the recent establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).
TRIPS was a multilateral treaty pushed for by some of America’s largest corporations, including Pfizer, with the help of the U.S Government. Countries that emerged from colonialism that no longer provided protection for pharmaceutical products so that they could develop their own industries and keep prices lower, were now again required to. At the same time as my arrival in India, there was a global HIV epidemic and the cost of antiretrovirals were priced out of reach for many in the Global South by the multinational companies at around $10,000. That was until Dr Yusuf Hamied, then CEO of the Indian generic company, offered to supply a cocktail of AIDS drugs at $1 a day. India became the focus of the battle to ensure access to affordable medicines for many of the poor in the world. In order to ensure this supply would not be blocked, a number of civil society organisations, including the one I had joined, started to challenge key patent applications for HIV and other medicines that the big pharmaceutical companies were now filing at the Indian Patent Office. I realised it was an opportunity to use the skills I had acquired during my private practice. Essentially, I flipped my legal practice from defending IP to breaking it in the public interest. I also felt that the imposition of TRIPs on India and other Global South countries that were trying to develop economically and technologically was an abuse of structural power, the kind of power that had made me leave private practice.
It was for these reasons that in 2006, while in India, I co-founded I-MAK with Priti Krishtel. We realised that there was a need for a focused intervention to address the impacts of intellectual property on public health needs, but also structural power systems. Although our work started in India, it soon expanded to working with partners in over 50 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine. Despite our work being global, it was always clear that the underlying problems and influence over the current global intellectual property system are rooted in the U.S. In 2016, with the U.S drug pricing crisis beginning to hit the headlines, we were encouraged to bring our work to focus on the problem here. Over the last 7 years, through our research, education and policy, we have helped patients, the broader public, the media and policymakers, better understand how the pharmaceutical industry takes advantage of Americans, and the rest of the world, by manipulating the patent system for its own gains.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
One particular story that always stands out for me is working with a woman called Lorena in Argentina. Lorena is a lawyer, but not in the field of intellectual property and patents. She is also a woman living with HIV. Lorena saw the difficulties that her community had in accessing affordable medicines and was determined to work on reversing the impact of intellectual property on medicines to make them more affordable in Argentina, Latin America, and globally.
Through our work together, Lorena has gone on to become a leading voice on this issue for not only people living with HIV in Argentina, but also anyone who is unable to get affordable access to medicines globally. Lorena grew her knowledge of the patent system rapidly and was advocating for patients at the Argentine Patent Office and in front of government officials, as well as filing successful patent challenges. Working with patient advocates like Lorena always centered me in this work and why I chose this path to help people have a voice in a system that otherwise ignores them and only listens to industry “experts”. An abiding memory of mine was at a global meeting for middle-income countries on intellectual property in Brasilia where Lorena stood up and said “we are people and not markets” when responding to the inadequate action by governments and international organisations in addressing the lack of access to affordable medicines.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Coming from private practice into a world of health activists, academics and policymakers that had been working on these issues for a number of years, I felt a little out of my depth. I was also viewed with suspicion, coming from the corporate world. Even though I was knowledgeable about intellectual property, I had to re-learn how I spoke about the subject. This motivated me to become as knowledgeable as I could on the issues, all while essentially flipping my corporate perspectives to now understand the public interest side of the conversation. I soon realised that while having more technical knowledge was helpful, it does not automatically make you the most effective advocate. While not funny or a mistake as such, it does make me laugh thinking about all the time I have spent getting more knowledgeable and “smarter,” but ultimately the communication has to be kept simple and accessible given the technical nature of the work and in order to reach more people. So, I guess the mistake was just focusing on having all the knowledge, instead of also how to communicate it. You need both. The positive is I have been able to mesh both these skills. It was a valuable lesson in making me become more effective in this work.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
More than one-third of Americans say they have not filled a prescription for medication because of its cost. Black Americans are most heavily impacted as they are more likely to require medication for chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure or diabetes, while having median incomes of nearly $30,000 less than white households. Globally, approximately two billion people worldwide struggle to afford medicines — especially those who are low-income, marginalized, of colour, and/or most at-risk. The recent pandemic showed us the global divide between the wealthy countries that hoarded most of the supply of vaccines as well as the knowledge on how to make the vaccines, while many in the poorest countries went without — leading to a case of vaccine apartheid.
There are several factors causing high drug prices that lead to the lack of availability and access. At the root of this problem is the patent system and how it is used by drugmakers to obtain as many patents as possible on a product, known as patent thickets, in order to lengthen their monopoly power, keep competition at bay, all while simultaneously increasing prices year on year. I-MAK’s work is focused on reforming the patent system with upstream solutions that get to the root of preventing drug companies from gaining the power in the first place that allows them to maximise revenues at the cost of patients. By doing so we also seek deeper structural and cultural change in how Americans understand the patent system as a form of property, including the institutions that govern it, and how it impacts their lives. The goal is to achieve economic justice and democratisation of the patent system in order to lower drug prices by ensuring that the public has a voice in how policies are set and that corporations like the pharmaceutical companies, their lawyers and lobbyists are not the only ones who have a say. We achieve this through our research, which includes making comprehensive patent data on medicines transparent for the first time, education of patients, policymakers and the media, and policy solutions that get to the root of the problem. In just 6 years we have successfully centered the issue of patents at the heart of the drug pricing conversation in the U.S and we are starting to see a cultural shift amongst the public, media and policymakers.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Starting a non-profit organisation is never easy. There are limited resources available and so many social justice issues that need addressing. When we started I-MAK in India, we were the new kids on the block tackling a very specific issue that was not very well understood. Some of our more established colleagues in the field were skeptical and even advised us against starting I-MAK. Foundations did not want to fund us or wanted to place conditions on us, such as who we work with and how we work. It was at this moment that we were fortunate to receive seed funding from Vinitha Menon and David Watson, who were living in India at the time and saw our work. Through their family foundation, they gave I-MAK seed funding for our first 5 years. This funding bought us our independence, allowing us the space and time to develop I-MAK the way we wanted to. Equally important was a colleague in the field, Daniel Ravicher, a lawyer from the U.S who was doing similar work to us through his own non-profit the Public Patent Foundation. Daniel barely knew us, but he stuck his neck out and took a risk by giving us fiscal sponsorship while we set up I-MAK as a legal non-profit entity in the U.S. I believe without Vinitha and David’s initial funding and Daniel’s fiscal sponsorhip, I-MAK may not have succeeded. We will always have immense gratitude for how they impacted I-MAK in our beginnings and as we matured.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Yes, first we need to use critical thinking whenever the word “innovation” is used to defend the patent system or intellectual property system. The word “innovation” actually has a different meaning than invention, but the two have become conveniently muddled to allow for more patenting, proprietiasation of knowledge and profit extraction. It’s a word that has become ubiquitous without any real meaning and is falsely synonymous with describing something that is new, non-obvious for a patent and progress.
Second, I would say to educate yourself about the historical context of the intellectual property system, how its philosophical roots as justification for property are embedded in colonialism and how that still persists today when we look at how international trade laws work. Finally, it is essential to participate and advocate for patent reform with your representatives and make your voices heard in our legislative system.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
For me, leadership is about critical thinking, having a north star vision and believing in it, no matter how challenging or isolating the journey may be. That means not following the crowd, group think (even if its colleagues in your field) or funding just to get easy “wins” or to give the illusion of “winning”, especially where it takes you in the wrong direction of your North Star. Leadership is also about leading from the back and giving credit or supporting somebody’s idea, solution or strategy they have brought to the table. It is about guiding, making space and allowing others the opportunities to become leaders in their own right. The more leaders you have the stronger a movement and the advocacy is. Leadership is also being prepared to accept when your interventions may be more harmful to the field in the long term and not pursuing them just for your own legacy, gain and power. Not going where the wind blows and going along the road less traveled is real leadership.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
1 . It is not always how much you know, it is how you say it. I have learned that you can have all the knowledge and technical information in the world, but without an effective grasp of how to communicate it in a way that the larger public can understand is going to limit your effectiveness as an advocate.
2 . Do not forget to take time off to replenish and have other interests that ground you. It is easy to feel burned out when you are deeply passionate about the work and when you are working to dismantle systems of injustice, but do not allow yourself to forget the power of rest.
3 . Change happens slowly, so do not get dejected or veer away from your values and north star when you are not getting the victories or easy wins. Learn how to play the long game. Also, some victories may not always look like victories and it’s important to recognise those. COVID-19 was an example of this where many in the access to medicines movement felt despondent when we didn’t get IP laws suspended at the WTO to improve the supply and accessibility to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. While that was the case and many lives were lost unnecessarily, I also saw it as a moment where the larger public and even the media became aware of the issues and the structural powers that create the injustice and inequity we see on this issue. In this sense, we had seeded some change for the longer term and in the scheme of things that should not be dismissed.
4 . There is always going to be conflict, there is always going to be a problem, there is always going to be something to solve. If you can’t resolve something today, there will always be another opportunity.
5 . Change does not end with you, so don’t get carried away with your own legacy building. The structures of power and injustice are deep and will require generational change. Your work is laying the pathway for the next generation so you can pass the baton on and make the next generation’s work easier because of what you did, not harder.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
My long-term systems change vision is to address outdated and culturally entrenched perceptions of patents as property in the U.S and bring a policy change. that will have ripple effects across the globe. We are addressing structural issues born from colonisation and now neocolonialism and neoliberealism within the IP system that are driving inequity in access to all medical products, but also greater extraction and privatisation of knowledge and data. The current IP system is designed to protect and serve commercial interests and the comparative advantage of Global North countries, preventing billions of people from accessing life-saving medicines in the name of profits. Our IP system determines the entirety of our medicines system, from research and development, to patents, to who ultimately receives the medicines they need.
To ensure that people all over the world have equitable access to medicines, we need to rewrite the rules. Part of rewriting the rules includes building a public knowledge system, so that everyone has access to information that they can utilize to build self dependence rather than dependency as exists under the current system. With this change, I envision countries in the Global South following their own rules, and not just the rules that were imposed on them. I also envision that the one in three Americans who are struggling to fill their prescriptions will have better access without the financial stress that currently impacts their ability to live healthy lives.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite life lesson is to not forget where you came from. As a person of colour with working class immigrant parents who were colonised by the British, I ensure I know my history and stay close to my roots. It helps keep me grounded and humble in the struggles of the majority and not get swayed by the trappings of power and acclaim that can take you away from your North Star.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Banksy (the artist). How someone can have such an impact while remaining completely hidden from the public eye? In many ways, I believe Banksy is a fascinating case study for leadership, impact, and influence.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
To learn more, readers can visit our website here, follow me on LinkedIn here, and follow I-MAK on Twitter here. Thank you!
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Tahir Amin of Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK)… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.