In November, Queen's opened a new health sciences centre with $1 million from Glaxo Wellcome - now GlaxoSmithKline - and named the facility the Glaxo Wellcome Clinical Education Centre. Outraged at the university's connection to GlaxoSmithKline, campus civil rights groups staged a rally in front of Stauffer Library where they circulated petitions demanding principal Bill Leggett sever ties to the company and create an ethics committee.

'MASS MURDER'

"The idea of suing a country and killing people is mass murder; it doesn't matter how you dress it up," local activist Janet Collins told a crowd of about 50 students. Between speeches, bongos beat along to chants of "Glaxo not welcome" and "Patients not patents." Several students sprawled on the sun-warm concrete in front of the library to dramatize statistics that say AIDS kills a South African every five minutes. "Having their name on one of our buildings is absolutely revolting to us because this lawsuit is absolutely obscene," said Daniel Krupp, a fourth-year psychology student and a member of Queen's Coalition Against Corporate Globalization. The coalition and two other campus activist groups, Queen's Project on International Development and Queen's Medical Outreach, made several demands of principal Leggett. They want the university to take the Glaxo name off the centre in the Louise D. Acton Building on Okill Street. They also want the university to sever ties with the corporation, to ask GlaxoSmithKline to drop its lawsuit and to lobby the federal government for more money for intellectual pursuits. About 30 of the protesters delivered their demands yesterday afternoon at a lively meeting at the principal's office.

NOT POSSIBLE

"I told them that as much as they would like me to be the first and last word ... that wasn't the way the university operated," Leggett told The Whig-Standard. On the basis of an Alma Mater Society suggestion, the university has struck a task force to look into the issue of accepting corporate and private gifts, the results of which should emerge in September, Leggett said. However, he said, the university compromised nothing when it accepted $1 million from GlaxoSmithKline for the $2.8-million centre. "There were absolutely no strings attached whatsoever," he said. Queen's was able to build a state-of-the-art clinical health training centre that has "hugely" improved the university's ability to train students in nursing, rehabilitative medicine and the medical school. COMPLEX ISSUE

Leggett told the protesters at his office that the university has lobbied government aggressively for decades for more funding but that he wasn't prepared to take any immediate action about GlaxoSmithKline since the issue is a complex one which goes beyond GlaxoSmithKline and the AIDS drug issue. "The whole foundation of the development of life-saving drugs around the world is based on the integrity of the intellectual property that relates to it," Leggett said. "The South African government is signatory to an international convention which guarantees this intellectual property will be respected.

"The only reason there's a court case going on is that the South African decided to break its commitment to that international law." GlaxoSmithKline, Leggett said, provides life-saving drugs at no cost to several Third World countries and money to support their use, he added.

COURT CASE

The court case between South Africa and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association of South Africa - a consortium of 39 companies, including GlaxoSmithKline - began in Pretoria in early March.
In 1997, then South African president Nelson Mandela passed a law allowing the import of generic AIDS drugs in order to provide affordable treatment to AIDS sufferers.

PRACTICE ALLOWED

The law will permit the importing of drugs from countries where they are cheaper, allowing South Africa to seize patents and make a generic copies. This practice is allowed by the World Trade Organization in countries where a health emergency has been declared.

South Africa believes the court challenge threatens the country's ability to beat the AIDS epidemic. While South Africa accounts for less than one per cent of the global $343-billion US drug market, the drug companies are most worried, if they lose this case, that the powers of generic manufacturers will be broadened. The big AIDS drug companies have all announced major projects to provide poor countries with cheaper drugs. In 1999, Glaxo pledged to lower the price of its AIDS treatment when used to prevent mother-to-child transmission.

Photos By Peter Boyle