Drug manufacturers get patents and a corresponding period of exclusivity. This is worse than patents in some ways because there's no time limit. It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation even after the relevant patents expire.
I don't buy this. "It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation _even after_ the relevant patents expire."
You've gone from "Drug manufacturers get patents and a period of exclusivity" to "Patent and exclusivity, and also protection from generics for the brand's life", but patents can be applied for at any time during a drugs development, including before it's ever been synthesized (e.g., theoretical manufacture via computer models) but the exclusivity is only a U.S. FDA marketing feature. Patents on a drug could expire before the exclusivity, so a competing manufacturer could create a secondary brandname drug and sell it overseas during that period. I'm really confused as to where this EULA would even fit in, since you've just moved the goalposts with your "even after" clause.
If the FDA had some kind of deterministic human trial of a drug, like some dystopian lab-grown identical human clones, of which drugs were trialled on and some company B was able to obtain a set of these clones from company A that had some kind of defect of which the drug was targeting as a cure or remedy for, and then used those proprietary clone models in order to test their clone drug against, we might have some kind of metaphor worth arguing against, but we don't.