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
)
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.
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