Very recently someone has acquired the title of "most hated man in America", and its the 32-year-old CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, who recently bought the drug Daraprim, a drug that helps to fight potentially fatal cases of malaria, AIDS, and toxoplasmosis. The thing that has everybody talking is the fact that he hiked the price of the drug from $13.50 per pill to $750.00 per pill, practically overnight.
This is a classic example of somebody using somebody else's dire situation to reap an absurd and unfair profit. This, as we hopefully can all agree, is wrong.
The drug, Daraprim, has a chemical structure pyrimethamine, which is public knowledge. In fact, there's a company in India who is producing a drug that is a substitute for Daraprim and the market price in India is about .05$. If America was a truly free market, any entrepreneur could easily provide this drug to people in need for a much more meager cost than $750. So why isn't this being done? Especially when it could save many lives that depend on being able to afford this drug.
Yet, in America, this is illegal. When Martin Shkreli bought the patent for Daraprim for $55 million, he wasn't buying the knowledge of how to make it. He was buying the exclusive FDA-approved right to sell the drug.
To try and market a copy of Daraprim in America would require filing an Abbreviated New Drug Approval with the FDA. The process of verification in the FDA to make sure the drug is safe and effective is notoriously extensive and expensive, leaving the only companies capable of making it through the process being large pharmaceutical companies who actively use excessive FDA regulation to keep the market monopolized in their favor.
If we were allowed the liberty to save each other from parasitic pharmaceutical companies and corrupt bureaucratic practices, thousands of American lives could be saved.
America has somehow given up on it's dream. Capitalism and free markets are an essential part of what made this country so great to begin with, yet America's excessive bureaucratic control, it has left our government handing enormous paychecks to rich, heartless pricks like Shkreli whilst simultaneously forcing thousands of people into unnecessary medically induced bankruptcy (or even death) as well as criminalizing anybody who would try and help them with free trade.
