Posted by Michael Wonder on 11 Mar 2018
Martin Shkreli's going away, America's drug price problem isn't
10 March 2018 - The pharma villain's sentencing won't end the controversy.
One long pharma industry nightmare is over, now that Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors. Another nightmare for which Shkreli was the poster child -- the controversy over U.S. drug-pricing -- goes on.
I haven't examined Shkreli's innermost soul, and he claimed at his sentencing hearing to have been changed by his trial and time in jail. But he has done an awfully good impression of a bad person. He defrauded investors. He took a decades-old, life-saving drug needed by vulnerable patients, raised its price by more than 5000 percent and then gloated about it. He harassed and threatened reporters. He once sported a Pepe the Frog pin on Bloomberg television, because wearing a symbol embraced by internet Nazis is hilarious.
