The Journalist and the Pharma Bro

Little known fact. The writer's real name is Stormy Daniels.

 

Honestly, the FDA should be banned for life from the pharmaceutical industry. They were the ones who created him.

This is unpopular to admit, and most people have no clue. ... the guy is a douche and everyone hates what he did and that is all that matters to people. But he did absolutely nothing that was illegal.

He exploited the FDA's regulations to jack the price of that drug. In an actual marketplace that they hadn't fucked up beyond belief, if he bought the rights to something that was off patent (this drug had been around since 1952) and tried to jack the price like that, it would have been a snap for someone to pump out a generic and keep him from getting away with it.

At the time there were factories all over India capable of producing generic versions of that drug in small amounts to sell for virtually nothing here. But nobody could make a generic because the FDA approval process, which was filled with inane hoops to jump through, would have cost millions of dollars that would never be recouped due to the market for that drug being so small. On top of all of that slow, costly, inefficient and arbitrary bureaucracy you would have had to navigate, the pharmaceutically equivalent studies they throw up like road blocks meant that anyone who would have immediately seen an opportunity to undercut his $750-a-pill price when he jacked the price up, needed to buy enough of the brand drug from Shrkeli himself in order get the FDA approval! And he saw an opportunity because of that.

There was nothing illegal (there is a difference between immoral and illegal) about him taking advantage of the stupid incentives the FDA had put in place to corner the market on orphan drugs. They gave a regulatory-created monopoly to the guy and only after the fact when everyone was like, "That is so fucked up," rather than focusing more on what had enabled him. ... a judge now deems what he did "anticompetitive" and makes him pay money and bars him from the industry in the latest case of "after the fact justice." Of course it was anticompetitive. That is what the FDA had put in place. It's largely because they exist to create barriers to entry that protect already established interests (which buy that protection with political donations). And we all pay for it.