The withdrawal of the pharmaceutical industry’s lawsuit against the nation of South Africa is a well-deserved black eye for the industry, a triumph of public pressure over the highest-priced legal talent the 39 manufacturers could muster. In the battle against AIDS, it is a moral victory that now must become a practical victory.

The lawsuit challenged a 1997 South African law that would have allowed the government to buy brand-name AIDS medications from nations where they were sold at lower cost. Thirty-nine manufacturers, some of the biggest names in the business, filed suit against South Africa alleging violations of international trade agreements, with President Nelson Mandela named as the first plaintiff.

After a six-month delay, the trial was to have resumed this week. Instead, on Thursday, the companies announced they were dropping the suit. Although the industry says it withdrew the suit because it worked out an acceptable settlement with the government, the truth is that the scorn from around the world, the growing consensus that these already wealthy corporations were cashing in on a health crisis had given Big Pharmaceuticals a negative image that surpassed that of Big Tobacco.

It is a health crisis of astonishing proportion. Nearly 5 million South Africans have AIDS, one in four adults are HIV-positive. The terribly poor nation cannot even begin to treat its sick and dying population; the task is so overwhelming that the government strategy until now has been essentially to deny that a crisis exists.

The end of the lawsuit puts pressure on the government of South Africa to get these medicines – some of which can turn AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic illness – to its people. To do that, the governments of the developed world – Europe and the United States in particular – which enacted the troublesome trade agreements at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, must help with money to buy the drugs and to get them delivered. And if it digs deeply enough into its own pocket, the pharmaceutical industry, which just spent a fortune trying to defend the indefensible, can buy some balm for that black eye.