[Drug therapy, testimony to our world and our time]

The past decade has undoubtedly been that of the planetarization of society's problems. The medicament has not escaped this, being at the very heart of health politics, and it even provides us with significant proof of this phenomenon. AIDS, itself a planetary plague, has revealed in this area, the universal search for therapy. The development of methodological pharmaceutical research means that it is increasingly dependent on the general development of science and technology. The discovery process is becoming longer and more costly and its success is even more uncertain as the criteria of therapeutic innovation are increasingly severe, raising the problem of the adequacy for medical challenges and contemporary medical practices. The same questions are raised in the economic sector, from now on dominated by the insistence on rationalizing treatment costs. The idea of valuation applied to therapy forms an appealing but ambiguous approach which leads to the standardization of therapy protocols and pushes the debate even as far as freedom of prescription. This economic debate becomes particularly prickly when dealing with the problem posed by humanitarian issues in Third World Countries. The exclusion of a very big part of the world's population from access to quality medicines forces us to rethink medical cooperation as a whole. This should be founded on the mutual responsibility of those involved and no longer on a misguided idea of aid. The future of medicine in the world therefore depends on the identification and resolution of a certain number of contradictions. This is in everybody's interests and current experiences show that it is possible.