well that I can’t really agree with. The cost for development of the next Mustang is in the cost of the one they’re selling now. Part of Ford’s profit margin from the vehicles they sell gets returned back into them making new ones. The difference, if this pill truly does cost $1 to make, is that Ford would be selling the pill for $1.15 (minus those development costs) to get their hoped for 10% profit margin instead of $750 or even $13.50 it was before. If you expect a for profit company to not get development costs paid for until after something is being sold, you’d never get them to develop anything new.
Something tells me that if this variety of home chemistry were to take off, there would be a coincidental bump in lobbying efforts for defining “controlled substances…”
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It sounds like great business practice if you can get away with it. I think every company would love to find a way to completely pre-recoup their development costs.
Except, isn’t this the argument that drug companies use all the time to explain why their drugs cost so much? “This cost us billions of dollars to develop, so we have to charge tons of money while it’s still under patent in order to recoup our development costs”
Even for generic medicaments a clearence is important, to ensure that the (side-)effects are identical. We had a case in Germany in this vane - a Indian CRO was contracted by 10 or so pharma companies to conduct bioequivalence studies for dozens of generic drugs.
Now we have 10 or so very unhappy pharma companies (and an unknown amount of pissed patients): The trials were manipulated and no one know’s if the drugs are working as expected.
Single payer healthcare system that covers prescription drugs, and the companies can haggle for price with the government which actually has the power to set up its own operation if the companies making the drugs set prices so high that it makes sense to do so.
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Controlled technologies, too.
That’s why the system as I am proposing has to be able of generic syntheses, so the reactors can be configured in a wide range of ways. The more generic, the better. Ban one precursor, another one gets used. Ban them all, we still got Fischer-Tropsch and waste biomass.
And why the devices involved should be easy to make, if possible with generic technologies. The same approach used for glass jewellery and glass reactor components. 3d printing leveraged. Microwaves or ultrasound used where high temperature/pressure would be needed instead.
Get the barrier to entry low enough, the tech used generic enough to not be ban-able without seriously crippling the economy (and pissing off everybody and forming a well-curated black market).
Like in chess - let the adversary choose how they will lose.
right. that’s why I added the comparison to what Ford expects to get back on their cars. Honestly I have no clue how much actual development of a drug is but biotech companies average 19.3% net profit and auto manufacturers is 4.9%. There’s a certain amount of extra risk in drug development in that they can spend a bunch of money on a new drug and the FDA not let it be sold. In the end, they still find a way to make the extra money and this is one of those ways.
The thing is, I don’t believe this guy when he says he was using the money to develop new drugs. I think he looked for a drug that was the only one used for a disease, probably carried a bunch of debt to buy the rights and was hoping to get a quick payback on it. He’s really just a day trader with no real interest in medicine watching the tick marks on his trading station.
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At the very least, there should be regulations on drug pricing. Some kind of balance between allowing companies to recoup money spent on R&D and make a reasonable profit, and still allowing access to the drug.
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There are laws against price gouging in many states. An increase of even 10-25% for necessities in case of an emergency can be punished. Yet a 5000% price increase is perfectly legal?
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I certainly don’t know local state laws, but my understanding of price gouging laws was that they were there to prevent people from raising prices in response to specific shortages or emergencies. Like during the great blackout there was one store selling 500mL bottles of water for $5 because it was a hot day and a lot of people were walking great distances.
A store simply deciding to set the price of bottled water at $5 every day is not price gouging, and I doubt laws would cover that because they’d be covering the day to day pricing choices made by businesses. The idea of capitalism is that $5 bottles of water just shouldn’t happen because of magical market force fairies. And I think that probably works for bottles of water when there isn’t a shortage. It clearly does not work for all products.
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5% is a BLESSING, what do you parasites want?
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Shkreli was unable to reply to this story, as he was out of the country, hunting lions.
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For the person with a life-threatening illness, getting the drugs constitutes an emergency, right?
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The whole system is broken and a public single payer that provides necessary drugs to everyone for free is the right way to solve it, but I don’t think that price gouging laws are likely written in a way that would apply here.
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Ideally, he should be infected with toxoplasmosis and denied Daraprim until he learns how to play nice.
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The AIDS epidemic does not constitute an emergency with regards to consumer exploitation.
Individuals in life-threatening conditions do not constitute an emergency, either 
I think we’d need to compromise his immune system, permanently for this to be a useful learning tool. He’s already a hedgefunder, it’s not as if the behavioral changes of the parasite would be unnatural to him.
I think he stated he would only mark it up 100% instead of the original 750%. Like he fooled anyone…
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The markup on the pills is already 1250%. $1 to make, sell for $13.50. His proposed price increase would have been a 74,900% markup (I think? My brain’s not working very well today)
That reminds me of an old Judge Dread comic in which the inhabitants of Mega City One became concerned that unscrupulous food manufacturers might been sneaking organic products in to the food chain. “Home Synthing” became a brief fad… with the usual farcically fatal results.
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