NEW YORK (Reuters) - Martin Shkreli, known for once hiking the price of a life-saving drug more than 4,000%, cannot return to the pharmaceutical industry after a federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld his lifetime ban.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said a lower court judge acted properly in imposing the ban and ordering Shkreli to repay $64.6 million because of his antitrust violations.

The case had been brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), joined by New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Shkreli, 40, became notorious and gained the sobriquet “Pharma Bro” when, as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals in 2015, he raised the price of the newly-acquired antiparasitic drug Daraprim overnight to $750 per tablet from $17.50.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        And guns don’t kill people. Once The bullet leaves the barrel it’s anyone’s guess where the bullet goes. If it happens to kill someone then the bullet was the issue, not the gun nor the person pulling the trigger.

    • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      Doesn’t matter, because generics were finally made available despite his efforts to prevent it and maintain a monopoly. They’re free to price it at whatever they want as long as they make it available to makers of generics to allow competition. Preventing that process and making excessive profits since they blocked alternatives, while making it difficult for patients to access who didn’t have enough insurance coverage, is the main reason he got such penalties.

      • BustinJiber@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        That’s all true but it’s also important to not dismiss his drug company culpability in the whole thing. They would fire him, and attack him only because he at that point was massive PR problem, not for any kind of attempt at accepting responsibility. If he wasn’t such a public asshole they would give him raise and bonuses, board membership, maybe even say he is on the way to be the CEO, he would be their favourite corporate jackass.

        • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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          11 months ago

          No one dismissed his drug company’s culpability in anything here. The company paid $40M of his penalties since it was, after all, his company.

  • reversebananimals@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I remeber when this piece of shit did a reddit AMA a few years ago and got thousands of upvotes. People still support him and he thinks he did nothing wrong.

    • VintageTech@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      What did he do, other than increase the price of a life savings drug? His Security Fraud convictions really aren’t all that different than what most companies already do, and there wasn’t a reported financial loss by any of his investors.

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Well he claims he actually gave the medication for free to anyone who was uninsured. His argument was that the $750 price was a middle finger to the insurance industry and to draw attention to gouging for pharmaceuticals in general. He believes Big Pharma made an example of him for this unwanted exposure.

        • astraeus@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          I think it goes both ways. He’s an absolute sham and deserves the lifetime ban, but I’m also sure that Big Pharma wanted to extinguish his fire before they got caught up in the flames. Of course with the amount of weight they pull at all levels of the government we may never see the day pharmaceutical companies are held completely responsible for the damages they’ve caused.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Didn’t he make some kind of fuck the poor people hip hop video or something?

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    I remember him saying that he increased the price to make money from insurance companies, and that it was written or disclaimed that if you couldn’t afford the new price of the pills, you could apply directly to the company and they were instructed to give out the pills to you for free.

    It was some line he spoutrd off while being marched somewhere to court or something and definitely sounded like b*******, but does anybody know anything about that?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      If it was written or disclaimed, it was somewhere in the middle of a 20 page block of legalese where no patient would ever find it.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Definitely, I’m just curious if there was anything to it at all or if he was just screaming it as a PR stunt as he was led away

    • CobblerScholar@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Last time I heard anything from him he was telling Do Kwon, the owner of the cryptocurrrency scam Luna, that prison wasn’t all that bad on a video call when Kwon actively had an arrest warrant out for him. He shouldn’t be allowed to own anything of real value ever again with the shit he’s pulled

  • moistclump@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Good.

    Hey does anyone have the numbers on the 64mill fine vs how much he profited off his shitty moves?

      • diannetea@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        You don’t even know the half of it, he played this MUD I was really into, his character’s name was Vanmar, everyone hated him. Maybe a year or so before the pharmacy story broke he got perma banned from the game (oh god I’m gonna skim over a lot here, bear with me) he bought another player’s super high skill character for iirc around 5k, went around bullying people who he couldn’t take in pvp beforehand, then got the permanent ban for all of his accounts by forcibly role-playing a blowjob in a public area (a boat I think) on some other dudes character.

        That was his second perma ban, he bought his way out of the first one, I don’t recall how the first one came about.

        Anyway, total twat. If you go deep in a search engine for Vanmar and DragonRealms you might find more info buried, a lot of its been lost to time and he bought one of the popular player forums around the game and locked it up so all that info is just lost.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Isn’t this another case of “They were fine with him, until he started stealing from the rich instead of just the poor”