[labster]

10/10 excellent troll

Raising prices by orders of magnitude on sufferers of rare diseases is a ticket to Hell in the express lane. Making the world hate you is not smart business. Instead of raising prices, maybe they could cut their massive marketing budget to finance more research.

[rndmwlk]

>cut their massive marketing budget to finance more research.

You think a company that sells a single drug for a rare disease has a massive marketing budget?

The pharma industry (medical industry in general, really) has been completely fucked for awhile, and Valeant did much more harm to people than Shkreli but no one bothers to actually read about anything. Knee jerk reactions and following the current is much easier.

[thrownblown]

Martin himself is the meta-troll most excellent here. You can't not like that he named his company after Alan Turning. Daraprim (the only drug they sold) is used to treat toxoplasmosis, also known as "crazy cat person syndrome", a condition caused by parasite. It makes you slightly crazy / more neurotic and you get it from living with cats.

He grey hat hacked the pharma system in a way that exposed the vulnerabilities of a the insurance payments here in the US. He did give it at no cost to anyone that reached out to him about not being able to afford it. From everything I've read about him, I really don't think he did this with the intent to harm, rather to show how effed it really is, by orders of magnitude.

What I didn't think he expected was for every other pharma multinational to follow suite, since he basically got away with it, got pretty wealthy too.

[syrrim]

If the marketing budget didn't pay for itself in new customers, they would have already cut it.

[jstanley]

Daraprim is actually much cheaper than lots of other rare disease drugs.

How are you supposed to make money making rare disease drugs if you sell them cheaply?

[and0]

Not a terrible point but it's worth considering that this was a 70-year-old drug. It's not like Shkreli put the money into the research in the first place, and he certainly profited personally.

(Not sure why anyone owns the "rights" to a drug that old in the first place..)