I know it's a weird thing to say, but when you get right down to it, there was no real reason for Martin Shkreli to be as big of a news story as he turned out to be in 2015. If the name doesn't ring a bell, holy shit, how much do you work? Is it so much that you just have zero time to consume news in any format, or so little that you can't afford to? Whatever the case, to give you some background, Martin Shkreli is the punchable-faced pharmaceutical executive who bought the rights to an AIDS drug called Daraprim and promptly jacked the price up from $13.50 a pill all the way to $750 a pill. That's a 5,556 percent increase, if you're keeping score at home.
Don't get me wrong, that's a deplorable thing to do, and people had every right to be outraged. But it's also a thing we've had plenty of opportunities to be outraged about in the past, and not once did we raise this kind of commotion over it. Granted, in those other cases, the increase wasn't quite as extreme, but in all, there have been at least 19 drugs over the past few years that shot up in price by anywhere from 300-1,200 percent in pretty much the exact same way.
twitter.com/MartinShkreli
Rampant douchebaggery?
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