I’m still absorbing the details of the price hike from $13.50 to $750 per tablet of the anti-parasite drug Daraprim after being acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company run by the human parasite, former hedge-fund manager Martin Shkreli.
I take this personally. Among other things Daraprim is used to treat toxoplasmosis, which I could get, says the Internet, by being too familiar with a cat. I take everything I read on the Internet seriously, especially if it concerns cats, because the Internet is all up in that.
This is a generic drug! The generic name is pyrimethamine and, having been around for more than 60 years, could technically be produced by other companies. That whole “invisible hand” thing of competitive capitalism is supposed to get in there and force the price back down, so where’s our hand?
We don’t get a hand. The reason is hard to take. Turing Pharmaceuticals, exploiting the fact that there was no other maker of the drug at the time they bought Daraprim, has narrowed distribution of it so competitors can’t legally procure any.
It boils down to this: The Food and Drug Administration (fda) won’t approve a generic version by a competitor until that competitor can prove its drug is the same as Daraprim, which they can’t do because Turing won’t let competitors have Daraprim to copy, and the Federal Trade Commission (ftc) blocks foreign competitors. It stems from some legal tangle involving the fda and ftc interpretations of indecisive court cases. We need a sword.
There are international companies that already make generic pyrimethamine. In England, a company sells it not for $13.50 a tablet but for less than 70 cents per tablet, meaning we were already being gouged at the $13.50 per tablet price. They can’t be imported, and the fda wouldn’t allow them to be sold if they were.
It amazes me that we can’t get inexpensive foreign generic drugs in the United States because that would be “socialism.”
The other countries have health care systems that are deemed socialist by conservatives in the U.S., and the public takes that to mean all that comes out of such systems undermines capitalism.
It’s the theory that says U.S. athletes shouldn’t have had to compete with Soviet athletes during the Cold War, because the Soviet athletes were subsidized. So the U.S.’s participation in the Olympics should have been banned. We should have also banned the importation of sheet music for commie-supported music like that of “Peter and the Wolf.”
I don’t want to dwell on what a waste of dna Shkreli is, because I don’t have to. I can point to the fact that he is not unique, and I can point out parallels between his behavior and the behavior of all the inhumane ceos in the world who are destroying people for quick unsustainable profit everywhere.
Another drug company acquired a drug used to treat tuberculosis and planned to jack the price up by a factor of 20 “to make sure the supply of the drug remained reliable.” To its credit, the company involved heard the uproar the plan caused and reversed its acquisition.
Take Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and former ceo of Nestlé, who wants the company to be able to buy up water rights throughout the world so Nestlé can force us all to buy water from it. When only Nestlé owns the water in your country, will the price of water increase by a factor of 50? Of course it will, that’s the point. That’s the only point of monopolizing it.
I could mention that the same sorts of maneuvers are causing everyone’s rents to go sky high, and it’s not just people poised to become homeless who are affected.
There’s a simple solution to all this. The solution is to realize it’s our world. We don’t have to let these few people control all the land and all the resources.
Outrage works. The latest news is that Shkreli is backing down.
We can take back our water, our land and our medicine.