Drug Company to Sell Pill for $1 That Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli Raised to $750

Remember Martin Shkreli, 2015’s Weasel of the Year, the type of guy who’d invite you to a dinner party, feed you anesthesia, remove your organs, and then sell them back to you for triple the market price? Who bought the rights to an AIDS drug and raised the price per pill from $13.50 to $750? And then said he’d lower the price but never did? And photoshopped an x-ray for sympathy in an unrelated matter?

(Don’t mind us, just building a character profile here.)

Well, his racket’s being destroyed by San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, who will sell the pill, Daraprim, for just $1. And now walls everywhere are on high alert.

The company’s CEO, Mark Baum, has vowed to continue undercutting pharmaceutical companies who jack up the price of generic drugs for profit. Imprimis, unofficial slogan ‘Dicking Over The Folks Who Are Dicking Over You’, mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions and will starting selling 100-capsule bottles of Daraprim for $99 as soon as orders come in.

Imprimis: We’re a giant pharmaceutical company that might not be evil

 

Most satisfying is the fact that Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim for $55 million for the privilege of jacking up its price by 5000%. He likely figured no generic drug manufacturers would bother stepping up to compete because Daraprim isn’t sold in a high enough amount to make it profitable given production and marketing costs (between 8,000 and 12,000 prescriptions get filled annually).

He was delightfully wrong, and for the first time likely ever you can read this non-ironically:

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Nothing like a dose of schadenfreude to start the weekend.

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