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While the shockingly high prices of prescription drugs continue to dominate the news, the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies to prevent generic competition are poorly understood, even by the lawmakers responsible for regulating them. In this groundbreaking work, Robin Feldman and Evan Frondorf illuminate the inner workings of the pharmaceutical market and show how drug companies twist health policy to achieve goals contrary to the public interest. In highly engaging prose, they offer specific examples of how generic competition has been stifled for years, with costs climbing into the billions and everyday consumers paying the price. Drug Wars is a guide to the current landscape, a roadmap for reform, and a warning of what is to come. It should be read by policymakers, academics, patients, and anyone else concerned with the soaring costs of prescription drugs.

Traditional justifications for patents are based on direct or indirect contribution to product creation. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) might provide such innovation, either directly, through working the patent or transfer of technology to others who do, or indirectly, when others copy. Available evidence suggests, however, that ex post licensing demands from NPEs do not normally involve these activities. Some have argued that patents are valuable without01/technology transfer because the ability to exclude may drive commercialization that would not otherwise occur. We demonstrate that even if commercialization theories sometimes justify patent protection, they cannot justify most NPE lawsuits or licensing demands.