Caught in a squeeze between the health needsof aging populations on one hand and the financialcrisis on the other, governments everywhere arelooking for ways to slow the growth in health-carespending. Increasingly, they are looking to the generic-drugs (普通药物) industry as a savior. InNovember Japan's finance ministry issued a report complaining that the country's use ofgenerics was less than a third of that in America or Britain. In the same month Canada'scompetition watchdog criticized the country's pharmacies for failing to pass on the savingsmade possible by the use of generic drugs. That greed, it reckoned, costs taxpayers nearlyC$1 billion a year.

　　Then on November 28th the European Commission issued the preliminary results of itsyear-long probe into drug giants in the European Union. The report reached a damning~,though provisional, conclusion: the drugs firms use a variety of unfair strategies to protecttheir expensive drugs by delaying the entry of cheaper generic opponents. Though this initialreport does not carry the force of law (a final report is due early next year), it has caused muchcontroversy. Neelie Kroes, the EU's competition commissioner, says she is ready to takelegal action if the evidence allows.

　　One strategy the investigators criticize is the use of the "patent duster( 专利群)". A firmkeen to defend its drug due to go off-patent may file dozens or hundreds of new patents,often of dubious merit, to confuse and terrify potential copycats and maintain itsmonopoly. An unnamed drugs firm once took out 1,300 patents across the EU on a singledrug. The report also suggests that out-of-court settlements between makers of patenteddrags and generics firms may be a strategy used by the former to delay market entry by thelatter.

　　According to EU officials, such misdeeds -have delayed the arrival of generic competitionand the accompanying savings. On average, rite report estimates, generics arrived sevenmonths after a patented drug lost its protection, though where the drug was a big seller thelag was four months. The report says taxpayers paid about q 3 billion more than they wouldhave-had the generics gone on sale immediately.

　　But hang on a minute, Though many of the charges of bad behavior leveled at thepatented-drugs industry by EU investigators may well be true, the report seems to let thegenerics industry off the hook(钩子) too lightly. After all, if the drugs giants stand accused, ineffect, of bribing opponents to delay the launch of cheap generics, shouldn't the companiesthat accepted those "bribes" also share the blame?