Why do you say that? Just because most modern pharmaceuticals were created with patents, doesn't mean that they wouldn't exist without patents.

Because trade secrets are virtually impossible in non-biologic drugs, the entire funding ecosystem around pharmaceuticals is driven by patents.

5 minutes of googling suggests that Penicillin was not patented and the mass production was later patented by the USDA (not some private pharma company). The entire modern funding ecosystem being patent based just means it's the most profitable business model, not that it's the only way to produce pharmaceuticals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2442141

Some drugs likely would be discovered through non profit efforts. But it seems reasonable to believe that we would be quite a bit farther behind overall without the profit motive.

Of course it’s not the only way to produce pharmaceuticals, as pharmaceuticals are thousands of years old. But without patents the number of new drugs pharmaceuticals over the last 50 years would be probably 1-5% of it actually was.

Maybe we would have less but better pharmaceuticals, because it would be easier to improve the existing ones.

The way the system is set up now, there would be little incentive to make pharmaceuticals without patents. The R&D cost is insane, so to be profitable, pharmaceutical companies need exclusive rights to their drugs.

Bearing that in mind, I have no reason to believe a fully state-funded pharmaceutical system would be impossible, tied into healthcare. However, to make people complacent with that, it would have to be unbelievably transparent. Many people fear the idea of the state designing and providing them with drugs.

This would probably be a net positive.

If you think that you are extremely uninformed about the many useful pharmaceuticals out there and are probably thinking of a few Longreads articles about fentanyl abuse and ADD overmedication.

I'm well aware that we'd have lost millions of lives if drug inventors were not able to patent medicines like Penicillin... er wait. Other stuff...

I'm also aware that there are all sorts of great medicines that have been invented and created and help people.

And, the economic incentives and distortions created seem detrimental.

Your allusion to the opiode crisis is actually a pretty non-trivial example. The opioid crisis is deeply connected to companies trying to push drugs into the market, get people addicted, and profit off of patents. Opioides are probably killing more people now than many other drugs combined are saving.

I could do without the entire profession of psychiatry for the most part, and the actually useful drugs - psychedelics - are being brought to market by a non-profit and are non-patentable by design. HTTP://Maps.org

I'm all for curious, creative and skilled scientists making drugs to help people - I don't like the side effects of the way the current economic system behind medicine works.

They wouldn't be as profitable - the focus would shift: quality would increase.