I have heard that drug patents are trivially circumvented by adding some irrelevant part to the active molecule. Instead it is the FDA approval process that prevents ripoffs.
Doesn't that mean pharma is the one industry where patents could be abolished with literally no consequence?
It is true that you can get around a patent by creating a slightly different molecule. However, drug companies aren't stupid. When they patent a drug, they are patenting a pretty big space around their molecule of interest. Pretty much every modification you can think of, they will patent. The resulting patents aren't just one molecule but rather an IP "space".
That doesn't follow. If patents were abolished companies that spent nothing on development would be able to produce the exact drug that the FDA had approved.
Doesn't that mean pharma is the one industry where patents could be abolished with literally no consequence?