I think you've missed the point here: without patents, we'd devise something else to protect drugs. It's not the case that just because you can reverse enginee

I think you've missed the point here: without patents, we'd devise something else to protect drugs. It's not the case that just because you can reverse engineer something, it's good for society that you're allowed to copy it. At least in the current system drug formulas are freely published, and we don't make everyone jump through the hoop of reverse-engineering. The argument is essentially "new medicines are good for society but expensive to develop, drug companies will only spend the money to develop new drugs if they can make a lot of money on the successes, drug companies won't make money if other people can copy the successes." If you remove patents, we'll have some other law to give drug companies their profits. Probably something along the lines of the DMCA, which effectively strengthened copyright to deal with technological developments, but was a huge step backwards in terms of what interested parties could do with copyrighted material.