In 2015, 32-year-old New York City entrepreneur Martin Shkreli founded a company called Turing Pharmaceuticals. The business plan was not to build out laboratories and create new drugs, but to buy up the licenses to existing, out-of-patent medicines and inflate their prices to generate profit.
Among these drugs was Daraprim, a treatment approved by the FDA in 1953 for the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis – a condition which is extremely common but does not actually cause any symptoms in most adults, save for those with immune system difficulties – most importantly AIDS. Despite its age and being out of patent, there is no generic version of Daraprim, and it can only be sold by the owner of the license – which Turing bought for $55 million in 2015. Almost immediately upon the acquisition of the license, Shkreli’s company jacked up the price of a single dose of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill, a 5,600% increase. Outrage followed and Martin Shkreli quickly became the most hated man in America.
Five years later, Shkreli is in federal prison and will remain so until 2023 at least. The people angered by his greed and cruelty, profiting immensely off the suffering of AIDS patients were no doubt happy to see the smug, shit-eating grin wiped off Shkreli’s punchable face. But his Daraprim price-gouging had nothing to do with his incarceration – at least not directly.
A few months after the public learned who he was, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI for running a Ponzi scheme, then tried and convicted of fraud – a matter completely unrelated to Daraprim or Turing Pharmaceuticals. It’s arguable, maybe even probable that increasing his profile and becoming so hated invited scrutiny against him which uncovered the Ponzi scheme, but the fact is that what Shkreli did with increasing the price of Daraprim for AIDS patients was perfectly legal. Abhorrent, monstrous, avaricious, barbaric, and 100% legal.
Now ask anyone, Republican or Democrat, hardcore MAGA or Resistance, whether or not Martin Shkreli is a scumbag and – aside from a few trolls and/or dickhead ultra-libertarians – you’ll get an unequivocal yes. There’s nothing overtly political about him or his tale in the context of the culture wars (though obviously there’s volumes to be written about the structural environment of decay in capitalism and our healthcare system that allowed this to happen in the first place).
And yet, if Shkreli were a prominent Republican donor, a member of Mar-a-Lago, well… It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture how the conversation would have gone.
Liberals and Conservatives have this scoresheet of who did what and which side they’re on. It has grown way too long over the past four years – Harvey Weinstein, Jussie Smollett, Michael Avenatti, etc on the left, and fuck we could be here all day listing who’s who on the right. I’m not running from the fact that I’m one of the worst offenders in this pissing contest, nor am I really going to lament the damage it does to whatever collective moral fiber we still have. Still, when I step back and take stock of the sheer carnage in the media and in online conversations from the existence of these opposing naughty lists – it’s kind of exhausting.
The only real conclusion I can come back with when surveying it is this: We’re in a world where basic questions of what’s right and what’s wrong have become politicized. The left are guilty of it, to a certain extent, but truth be told it’s extremely difficult to feel like a Staples in Minneapolis being burned to the ground by a bunch of teenagers is more consequential than the outright thievery of American tax dollars by the current President in his constant self-dealing by having the government pay premium prices for accommodations at his resorts – just as a handy example to say nothing else of his deep ocean of other scams.
Trump is evil. There’s no two ways about it. He is evil. He’s probably a worse human being than Martin Shkreli if we’re going to talk about impact he’s had on the lives of Americans. He purposely ignored a deadly pandemic which has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people because he’s either too lazy or too scared of making tough calls or both, to say nothing of all the terrible policies and actions in office that came before that. There’s plenty of examples of perfectly legal actions that Trump took in office that are still atrocious. The punishment for which was to be found at the ballot box, and that’s where he paid for it.
But imagine Trump was a decent president who, say, got the Chinese Communist Party to disband and hold free elections for the first time ever, built a manned base on the moon, successfully completed infrastructure week – or better yet imagine he never became president at all because that’s actually easier – and still you have a criminal.
A tax cheat. A fraudster. A thief who ripped off his vendors. An unapologetic rapist. To want to let these go just because Trump is a Republican and it could be seen as “politicizing” a prosecution is to simply want him to be above the law because he’s your guy. A criminal is a criminal is a criminal.
Of course we fucking want revenge on Trump for the embarrassment and disgust he causes in we Americans opposed to his regime. We’ve got the first step out of the way toward that, next year comes the fun part. We’re going to enjoy this immensely. It’s nobody’s fault but Trump’s that he’s going to make it easy to indict him in either a federal or New York State court, just as it was nobody’s fault but Martin Shkreli’s that he was running a Ponzi scheme whilst also painting a bullseye on his own back by gouging people suffering from AIDS. The damage Trump has done to American lives and treasure will be with us for a long time. That the crimes he may be prosecuted for will probably not have any direct relation to that damage is not really worth arguing.
The crimes are still there.
The damage is still there too.
Daraprim still costs $750 a pill, though the FDA approved the first generic version earlier this year.