Why Martin Shkreli Won’t Be the Last Pharma Bro

By Josh Hoxie, Fortune

10 August 17

artin Shkreli—famously known as the guy that jacked up the price of a lifesaving AIDS treatment by 5,000%—finally saw his day in court, albeit for a completely unrelated case involving an unrelated company from his time as a hedge fund manager. The trial, just concluded last week, found Shkreli guilty of three counts of fraud for essentially lying to his investors about how he would invest their money and when they would be paid back.

The conviction, carrying a potential 20 years in prison, is no joke. Yet the notorious self-promoter took the opportunity to extend his 15 minutes of fame by creating a media spectacle of the trial. From making silly faces in court, to trolling female journalists online, to referring to the prosecution as “junior varsity,” the Pharma Bro let the world know he wasn’t fazed.

And why should he be? How Shkreli got rich in the first place remains not just legal but celebrated.

Shkreli is a pharmaceutical company executive, and by industry standards he appears to be a very good one. He became famous for purchasing the exclusive rights to sell the life-saving drug Daraprim and raising the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. This sparked outrage and condemnation, but also significant profit.

The real crime of the Pharma Bro is the unrepentant greed that drives him, as well as the industry he’s thrived in. Sen. Bernie Sanders has attempted to put a stop to this greed with recently introduced legislation to cap prices for pharmaceuticals developed by government-funded research. Far from a new idea, Sanders has been pushing for a bill like this for decades.

It’s easy to lose track of the big picture when talking about Shkreli. He is, after all, the kind of guy that would auction off the opportunity to punch him in the face and also the kind of guy for which that would be a pretty big draw.

Yet what he represents is far more sinister than just your garden variety jerk—although he’s certainly that. While raising the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000% rightfully drew the scorn of millions of people, price gouging is all too common for the industry. Take the EpiPen, the lifesaving device for kids and adults with severe allergies, whose price was famously hiked up over 500% in the years after it was acquired by Mylan.

Pharmaceutical executives defend their exorbitant prices by pointing to the supposedly exorbitant cost of research and development. Yet Big Pharma spends more on marketing than R&D, a fact that probably doesn’t surprise anyone who’s been near a television. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson alone spent more than double on ads than they did on research.

These companies also spend exorbitant sums on making their executives and shareholders fabulously wealthy. Pfizer alone spent over $120 billion on share buybacks and dividend payouts to investors from 2003 to 2012, all while reaping enormous benefits from taxpayer-funded investments in drug development.

Laws that protect investors in these companies are what landed Shkreli in court. Yet until there are laws to protect patients from drug company extortion, like the one proposed by Sanders, the line of Pharma Bros ready to take his place is already queued up.

The Pacific Northwest's Fiery Week Warns of Hotter Times to Come

By Eric Holthaus, Grist

10 August 17

t’s feeling a little apocalypse-y in the Pacific Northwest this week.

With excessive heat warnings and temperatures reaching the triple digits from northern California through Washington state (places where air conditioning is far from a given), it’s a bit hard to fathom that this week should have been even hotter.

All-time records could have been set up and down the coast, if it hadn’t been for the thick smoke streaming down from more than 100 massive forest fires in British Columbia, about 500 miles north.

You heard that right — the smoke in places like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver was so thick it changed the weather. At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, smoke even kept flights from taking off. (From the air, you couldn’t even see the ground.) In Seattle on Thursday, the air quality was worse than in Beijing.

Welcome to climate change, 2017 edition.

This interplay between fire and hot weather has inspired a bleak and eerie feeling for people in this part of the country. As climate scientist Sarah Myhre writes for Seattle’s alternative newspaper, the visceral experience of climate change in the future might feel a lot like it does this week in the Emerald City.

Hot temperatures increase evaporation rates and dry out the soil, resulting in even hotter temperatures. Drier weather makes wildfire more likely, and wildfires in a hot and dry environment can spark pyrocumulus clouds — freak thunderstorms borne literally of the heat of the fires themselves, whose lightning can spark new fires. (This actually happened in northern California on Wednesday.)

It’s no wonder it feels like a sneak peak at the end of the world.

It’s normally fairly dry this time of year from Sacramento to Juneau, but the last six weeks have been exceptional. This summer’s wildfires in British Columbia are the worst in more than half a century. If it doesn’t rain this weekend — and it’s not forecast to — Seattle will set a new a new all-time record for consecutive days without measurable rainfall.

In a normal year, Seattle reaches 90 degrees only three times. In this week’s heatwave alone, Seattle may reach that mark seven days in a row. In parts of southern Oregon, temps rose above 110 degrees this week even despite the smoke. And the latest forecast shows that the smoke might stick around for at least another week.

Overnight lows, in particular, were record warm this week — a classic signal of global warming. The changing atmosphere is effectively becoming a thicker blanket, preventing heat from escaping into space at night, making overnight temperatures warm even faster than daytime highs. That’s a worrying trend for public health.

At 1 a.m. on Thursday morning in Seattle, the temperature was still 77 degrees, equivalent to the average high for this time of the year. Without the smoke, the high on Thursday would likely have breached 100 for just the fourth time since weather records began in Seattle, back in 1894.

As the New York Times points out, only about one-third of Seattle’s homes have air conditioning. The inability to cool down is a public health hazard in extended heatwaves like this; studies of hyperthermia consistently show that it’s the lack of overnight recovery time that can become deadly.

A new study out this week projected that, should global carbon emissions continue unchecked, more than 500 million people in South Asia alone could be subjected to heatwaves so intense by the end of this century that they could kill even healthy people that happened to venture outdoors.

That’s exactly what scientists mean when they say climate change could render parts of our planet uninhabitable. This week’s weather, as mild as it is in comparison, is yet another warning sign.