Dr. Strangedrug or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Martin Shkreli

By now I think it's safe to say that we all agree that Martin Shkreli is an asshole. Though many people and various publications have taken to naming him the "pharma bro" (honestly, why?), that title is not nearly sinister enough to apply to a gentleman who jacked up the price of a drug on the WHO's List of Essential Medicines by more than 5000% literally overnight... but I digress. Now I am as disgusted by Shkreli as the next anyone-possessing-a-conscience, and I am certainly pro-witch-hunt and especially pro-Shkreli exclusive douchebag tax, as proposed by Reddit user u/Fmello. But angry internet mob, Romans, country[wo]men, our wrath is partially misplaced. Hate this guy on a personal level, that much he has earned; but let's not turn him into the new Walter Palmer and instead focus some of this passion on a number of seriously broken systems.

The first thought most sane people would have when hearing of Shkreli's atrocities is something along the lines of "why would someone do that?" Well the answer there is pretty easy, greed is a powerful beast. The more appropriate question really is "how?" As in, "how is it possible that someone can expect to make so much profit off of sick people's required fucking medications?" Shkreli hasn't reinvented the wheel, he's only more obviously crushed people with it, and people making obscene amounts of money off sick people is nothing new. Take, for example, Forbes' list of the 25 most highly-paid American CEOs. Sparing you having to click through a slideshow (ugh), I'll just tell you that 6 of these 25-- or about 25%-- are at the helm of pharmaceutical or vaguely-worded biotechnology conglomerates, including #1 John Hammergren. This is a guy whose annual compensation totals about $31 million more than any estimate I've seen of Shkreli's entire net worth, and he's virtually unheard of. From this other Forbes article about the largest drug and biotech companies, we can glean how exactly people like Hammergren can get paid so exorbitantly and that is by utterly ridiculous profit margins. Obviously, these are corporations in a capitalist society and so they are entitled to profits; the morally questionable nature of making billions off of illness is neither here nor there for the moment, because that's just the way it is. But the flippant attitude that seems to exist toward this is its own distinct problem.

Let's look at (shocker) yet another Forbes article, from February of this year, that demonstrates how truly fucked up the pharmaceutical industry is. The piece looks to determine factors contributing to the trend of rising prices for generic medications, its author concluding that the answer is a combination of drug shortages due to both manufacturing issues and regulation and industry consolidation. As the author explains, these industry setbacks have resulted in some manufacturers creating a "tiered pricing system ... that would require members to pick up more of the cost." The word I find interesting here is "require," as if to suggest that the multi-billion dollar corporations physically could not pick up the extra costs in place of the patients. In fact, the article explicitly states that although "drug shortages would have a negative impact on patients needing those medications, drug makers might not be ready to make capital investments required for increasing production capacity as costs are significant." Just to recap, this is an industry where higher-paid CEOs can expect to make more than $100 million in 12 months, claiming to be less prepared to absorb high costs than sick people. More shocking than this absurd level of greed, which most people probably can't actually fathom, is how utterly unfazed people are by this behavior.

Unfazed, that is, until the internet found out about Shkreli's overnight price gouging and launched the crusade against him. As a human being (if he is one), Shkreli seems relatively unaffected, answering "you know, ambien," when asked on twitter how he sleeps at night in light of this controversy. As a businessman, though, Shkreli has apparently been shamed sufficiently, saying that he will lower the price of the drug as a response to widespread outrage. As the Washington Post (and surely, many others) would say, success, the internet has created a pariah and action is being taken as a result. This is misleading. As we've already established, jacking up prices of life-saving drugs is an industry-spanning practice; Daraprim is only one drug. Actually, in much of the rest of the developed world, Daraprim is not even the medication used to treat toxoplasmosis; Spiramycin is. In the US, though, Spiramycin is considered "experimental" by the FDA and only available for pregnant women via special request from their physicians. So, this antibiotic trusted in most of Europe and Canada (where healthcare is rated significantly better than in America) is too experimental for the FDA to give blanket approval but sketchy permanent birth control device essure has had approval since 2002, despite seriously adverse side effects. So let's not get ahead of ourselves calling this campaign a "success."

It should be noted, by the way, that the evil of pharma companies is by no means a new or newly-discovered phenomenon. Little Marty is evil but he's not definitively more evil than other biotech fat cats-- so from where did this absolute outrage come? A generally enlightening practice is to recognize that when most major news outlets (and presidential hopefuls

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are suddenly pointing left there is something pretty important going on to our right. The collective attention span is so compromised that even today, I debated whether three days after the fact, this would no longer be relevant. But that's the entire problem all over again, a nonchalance about these issues past a headline. So yeah, Martin Shkreli is a colossal douche, but I'm actually thanking him for giving us such an almost impossibly smug face to serve as the poster boy for a fucked-up system, who can hopefully spur some lasting change, even if it is out of repulsion. 

3.5 Billion Chances for Change

Between the early 1980s and today, over 3.5 billion people were born, making up over half of the world's current population. In the same period a great deal else has happened, as well: we have transitioned from the Cold War mentality which dominated much of the world for decades prior; AIDS has gone from being a scary blip on the radar of doctors and certain segments of the community to one of the most familiar and widely-ravaging epidemics in history; advanved technology has leapt from the pages of George Orwell and Robert Heinlein to our back pockets, with over 71% of Americans, and as much as 85% of American Millenials, owning smartphones. These are developments around which the youth of 2015 has grown and they have shaped our worldview into something utterly unimaginable as recently as 35 years ago.

The preceding generation often does not understand, or even acknowledge, the shifts in culture that have occurred. Having spoken at length about social, political, and economic topics with parents, their friends, and many of my friends' parents, I have noticed a trend among many of them of perceiving today's forward-thinking youth as mere extensions of their movements of backlash against their own parents' society. To a certain extent, this is true, but it is incomplete and does not grasp the level of change which has taken place. Though most of this generation is certainly more enlightened and aware of global issues than those which came before it, there still exist remnants of the conditioning under which they were raised that pervade their worldview no matter how well-intentioned they may be. As a self-identified feminist, I am often surprised by the number of people older than I am who still believe that feminism is concerned solely with breaking down the limits placed on women by their social upbringings; there are 3.5 billion people who are more likely to believe that the limitations placed on men are also damaging and in need of a revolution.

We are a cosmopolitan generation which has evolved beneath the loom of videogames and personal computers, but 3.5 billion of us are able to understand that technological advancement need not, and can not, take the place of humanity. We have seen firsthand the awesome power of social media as a tool of mass communication and coordination for major cultural revolutions, but we are also well aware that those revolutions required actual person-to-person interaction. There are 3.5 billion people today who understand that the Arab Spring and the Ferguson and Baltimore protests have been promoted with technology, but made possible by humanity.

The Revolution of Bodymore, Murdaland

Bricks in hands, knives, purse-snatchings, and the cutting of firefighters' hoses being used to put out the flames in a looted CVS store. This is the Baltimore of late that the media is showing, and it is certainly scary and certainly true--- but it is also a limited view. In casual conversation with strangers, on the internet, and in the news the one word I've been hearing repeatedly is "riot," but this might not be the fairest label. First of all, it must be understood, that the majority of people taking to the streets of Baltimore right now are acting peacefully and it is only a sliver of protesters perpetrating the violence (not unlike the sliver of law enforcement whose heinous actions build a negative reputation for law enforcement as a whole in the U.S.). For those calling on the people of Baltimore to behave more like the participants of the Million Man March and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, I defy you to point out concrete differences in these three pictures, other than the backgrounds.

 At this point, it has become so trite to be angry about the death of a black man at the hands of police in America that most people to whom I've spoken don't know Freddie Gray's story-- a travesty considering his death, though shrouded in mystery, is arguably the most wrongful and unjustified of all in this recent string. So, pray tell, what is a minority segment in a population supposed to do when there is repeated and long-standing proof of serious, violent oppression and little more done about it than widespread usage of a few hashtags?

As an internet geek (aka a person born in 1989), I've seen the question posed countless times by non-Americans what exactly it would take for Americans to revolt. We are well aware that the NSA (at least) is infringing on our basic rights to privacy; we are aware that our government goes to great lengths to punish any individual trying to expose its crimes against humanity (though many seem to have forgotten about Chelsea Manning, surely we recall a man by the name of Edward Snowden); we are aware that our government is willing to sacrifice our natural world in the name of profit (Keystone, anyone?). We know all of these things and do very little about them, and people from elsewhere wonder why. Yet here we are, staring a more urgent problem right in the face, and some of these same people are wondering why there is a reaction of violence. Over the past few days MLK's path of non-violent resistance has been called for innumerable times. Yet even he, beacon of peace and civil disobedience, understood that "A riot is the language of the unheard." In the United States and France in the late 18th century, in 1915 in the city of Van when Armenians fought back against the Ottoman Empire, even five years ago in Egypt and Tunisia, violent upheavals were called Revolution. Why then, today, are we so quick to call this a riot?

The issue of criminality and racially-motivated police brutality is massive and complex, particularly in Baltimore, and it would be foolish for anyone to try to dissect it in a few days. But if there is anyone who can offer a smart and informed view of the situation at hand, it is surely David Simon, probably best known as the creator of The Wire and overall Baltimore crime expert. In his always beautiful blog "The Audacity of Despair," Mr. Simon has called on Baltimore's violent protesters to "Turn around. Go home" so as not to diminish the potential progress that could be made by civilly fighting back in Freddie Gray's honor.  This is sage advice from someone who knows Baltimore inside and out; but let us not forget, while we rush to label any and all riotous behavior needless and destructive, that damage to people is always bad but damage to a flawed and unjust system is not. Of course we all want the "riots" to stop before people get seriously hurt, but the oppression being fought hasn't stopped without people getting hurt and it might do some good to remember that anger spilling over into the streets, such as the 1992 L.A. riots, have sometimes resulted in actual change.

Awards Yeezon has Begun

Ok, so Kanye West almost acted ridiculously, again, at the Grammys on Sunday. That much of the question is answered, strongly, in the affirmative. Now, the second part: is it really as much of a big f#*$ing deal as the general census is making it? Consider the following before deciding.

One, Kanye has a history of this behavior. Obviously, there is no need to remind anyone that he hijacked Taylor Swift's acceptance speech once before. But maybe there is need to refresh our memory of the details. In that instance, Kanye voiced his disapproval that T. Swift won the Best Female Video for "You Belong with Me" over Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video. Six years later, a lot of us still vividly recall the latter, but the former has hardly stood the test of time. As asinine as as Kanye's form of expression was, it could almost be considered a fact that he was right. Even the VMAs agreed, apparently, as Beyonce went on to win the Video of the Year Award. Why did everyone seem to ignore so easily the completely illogical fact that Beyonce won Best in Show without first winning Best in Group? Her video was the best of the year overall but not the best by a female artist? To quote Ron Burgundy, that doesn't make any sense.

Second, let's consider this specific incident. Beck beat Beyonce for the Album of the Year Grammy with Morning Phase. I'll start by noting that I am a longtime Beck fan; I think Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime is one of the most criminally underrated songs ever recorded. The album "The Information" is in constant rotation on my mp3 player, and I will not soon forget the genius that is "Odelay." I'm going to admit here, though, that I have not heard Morning Phase yet. I'm sure it's phenomenal, I have very little doubt of its magnificence, but in all likelihood it is not Odelay quality and in case anyone forgot, Odelay didn't win Album of the Year (though it did win for Alternative Album of the Year). So, should Beck have beaten Beyonce out for the Album of the Year Grammy? I'm not qualified to answer having not listened to either album in their entirety. But here's the more important question: since when does anyone believe the Grammys are relevant anymore? Fans of all types of music have decried the awards for years for being completely out of touch with actual musical culture, but suddenly it is a shock to someone that they may have gotten something wrong? Even past winners of Grammys have called out the fact that the Awards may be flawed (I'm thinking of you, awkward/awesome acceptance speech by Bon Iver), say when winning the Best New Artist Award FOUR YEARS after releasing a cult favorite studio album. My point is this: maybe Beck deserved that award, maybe Beyonce did. Fuck, maybe someone else entirely did. But it was not off base of Kanye to call out the Grammys in general for being wrong, as they quite often are. Want further proof? The same night, Paramore beat The Black Keys, Ryan Adams, and Jack White (as well as Beck) for Best Rock Song. Paramore. Best Rock Song. Paramore. "Ain't it Fun?" No, it ain't.

Third, I have heard over the past few days an alarming number of critics label Kanye West a racist person because of this near outburst. Now, what qualifies somebody as a "racist" individual is far from a black and white issue; there are shades of grey and beige and tan. It is a complex issue and it would be hard to say about most persons that they were undoubtedly racist. Obviously, some people blatantly admit that they are and hold extreme views, but the average person does not and the average person probably holds one belief or another that somebody else would label as racially prejudiced. But as far as music goes, no, Kanye is not racist. Oh, he publicly bemoaned twice that a white artist had secured an award over a black artist? Wow! That's proof right there, huh!? Again, no it ain't. First of all, it is not as if Kanye used generalities like "Oh a black artist should have won those awards." Both times, he wanted one specific artist to have won, who happens to be black. That doesn't make him racist; if anything, it makes him President of the Beyhive. Perhaps he just thinks that Beyonce in particular hasn't gotten the award show credit she is due; if anything, deciding that that is a racial issue makes the stone-thrower more racist than anyone else in question. In this more recent case, he believed that a female should have won over a male. How come nobody is jumping to call him that other dreaded label: Feminist? Kanye West has a long history of collaborating with white artists and musicians. Adam Levine, Chris Martin, Mr. Hudson, and Bon Iver have all been featured on Kanye songs; GOOD Music artists Kacy Hill and Ryan McDermott were both signed by Kanye; oh yeah and as I'm sure we've all heard by now, he has been working of late with Sir Paul Fucking McCartney. White enough for you yet? Yes, he has worked with more black artists than white to date, but he certainly seems to appreciate a talented artist of any color and it's ridiculous to claim otherwise.

It basically comes down to this. Kanye West is outspoken and expresses what he believes to be true at all opportunities. This should not necessarily be punished or unwelcome. I for one would rather this than the usual fake celebrity personas put out by musicians with little to no artistic integrity. Call him obnoxious, fine, but then quickly get the hell over it, rather than make everything that comes out of his mouth into a major issue. People made far too big a deal out of his interrupting T. Swift, when that probably did more for her career than any other single move she's made and now six years later they have buried the hatchet to the point where they will allegedly work together. Perhaps instead of whining about his behavior at the Grammys we should just hope it leads to him collaborating with Beck in the future.