Imagine needing a medication that costs less than a fast-food meal—only to wake up the next day and find it's suddenly priced like a luxury car payment…per single pill.
That's exactly what happened in 2015 when Martin Shkreli, a hedge fund manager turned pharmaceutical executive, decided to hike the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis. Overnight, a 5,456% increase made him the face of greed in medicine. The internet quickly gave him a nickname he'll never shake: "Pharma Bro."
Shkreli justified the increase, telling Bloomberg TV, “We needed to turn a profit on this drug." He continued, explaining, “The companies before us were actually giving it away almost.”
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The story had all the makings of a modern villain arc. A 32-year-old in a hoodie smirking through congressional hearings, acting unfazed while patients and doctors begged for answers. Even the pharmaceutical industry's own lobbying group threw him under the bus, tweeting that Turing Pharmaceuticals "does not represent the values of @PhRMA." That's how bad it was—Big Pharma wanted nothing to do with him.
The absurd part? Daraprim wasn't new. It had been around since the 1950s, its patent long expired, and it cost pennies to make. But without a generic competitor in the U.S., Shkreli held the keys. "The market sort of sets it up where, if you need it, you have to pay for it," said Joey Mattingly, a University of Maryland pharmacy professor, according to a 2018 report by KFF Health News. "A for-profit entity is going to raise the price." Shkreli proved the point in the worst way possible.
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The legal hammer eventually came down. In 2022, a federal court found that Shkreli schemed to block competition and keep Daraprim's price sky-high. He was ordered to pay back $64.6 million and banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life.
New York Attorney General Letitia James didn't hold back, saying, "Envy, greed, lust, and hate, don't just separate, but they obviously motivated Mr. Shkreli and his partner to illegally jack up the price of a life-saving drug as Americans' lives hung in the balance." Two years later, the ban was upheld on appeal, locking the door permanently.
As for Shkreli, his prison sentence wasn't even for Daraprim—it was for securities fraud. Convicted in 2018, he spent about five years behind bars before his release in 2022.
In 2023, Business Insider reported, based on probation documents, that he was living with his sister in Queens and working as a consultant at a small law firm making $2,500 a month.
And yet, the punchline is almost darker than the scandal itself. A decade later, Daraprim still costs hundreds of dollars per pill in the U.S. Currently, Drugs.com lists the brand name price of Daraprim at $73,267.90 for 100 tablets.
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Nicholson Price, a law professor at the University of Michigan, put it bluntly speaking to KFF Health News: "Drug prices are easy to raise and harder to lower, particularly if there's no competition. The mystery isn't, ‘Why don't drug prices go down?' It's more, ‘Why don't they go up more?'"
Shkreli lost his company, his reputation, and his shot at a future in pharma, but the system that turned him into Pharma Bro? That's still alive and well.
Around the same time Daraprim was making headlines, entrepreneur Mark Cuban teamed up with Alex Oshmyansky to launch online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs. Their pitch? Sell generics at little more than manufacturing cost, tack on a 15% markup plus fixed fees.
In 2022, their site launched with just over 100 medicines; by late 2023, it offered more than 2,200. Beyond transparency, they're even building their own manufacturing plant in Dallas, aiming to curb drug shortages while exposing how much middlemen inflate prices. It's a far cry from Pharma Bro—but just what the system needs.
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