The economic downturn is affecting everyone, and it has hit local amateur commercial basketball particularly hard. The Philippine Basketball League, the traditional breeding ground for Philippine basketball's rising stars, beginning their new tournament while reeling from the departure of two members (Burger King and Toyota Otis), are down to five teams.

It makes sense. Unlike the PBA, the PBL is truly borne out of love: companies pay teams to play in near-empty arenas and there is next to no one watching on television.

This is Fire Quinito's primer for each team, with a different twist: a profile of each team owner. Who are they, and what do they do? And why the hell are they still in the PBL?

On tap, Jappy Pascual and the Pharex Generix.

Ah, finally, a PBL team that Asterix, Obelix, and Vitalstatistix would love! Pharex is the generics arm of Pascual Laboratories, the country's second-largest local pharmaceutical company behind Unilab. The company's operations are still dwarfed by overall industry no. 1 Unilab, but then again, Pascual Laboratories' founder was never buddy-buddy with the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos.

But digging through the files, I couldn't find anything particularly interesting about the owner or the Pascual family, except for the fact that Jappy Pascual is the Pascual in Lyn Ching-Pascual.

So instead, here is a discussion of the state of the generic drugs industry in the Philippines.

The Generics Law in the Philippines has been around for about twenty years now, according to Winnie Monsod, generic products are less than 5 percent of all drugs and medicine sales in the country. One problem that the law had was that doctors were still allowed to prescribe branded medicine alongside the generic prescription. Monsod attributes this to the cozy relationship of doctors to pharmaceuticals:

That they seem to have very cozy relationships with drug companies is perhaps due to the fact that they get a lot of freebies, which are ultimately paid for by the Filipino consumer: 20 percent of the price paid by Filipinos for their medicine is used by pharmaceuticals to pay for “promotions,” i.e., expenses incurred for sponsoring doctors’ foreign trips, seminars, conferences, as well as ads and other endorsements.

Doctors and medical professionals in the country, on the other hand, are fighting to continue prescribing branded drugs because they are not sure about the generic version's effectiveness, arguing that while it may contain the same formulation, generic drugs may not have the same bioavailability. Bioavailability is basically the measure by which a drug is absorbed by the body, and therefore a measure of its effectiveness.

Consumer rights groups have hailed this position as bunk, claiming that the doctors have sold the people out.

In the United States, as Monsod cited in her article, 60 percent of drug sales are generic, despite the law being passed only six years ago. This is due to the stringent processes of the US Food and Drug Administration for approving generic drugs, thus ensuring that generics not only have the same formulation, but also the same efficacy.