the long arc of martin shkreli’s actions, and why his greed matters
In 2002, I made a career decision: rather than focusing on music writing, which I loved dearly and had been doing fairly regularly for a while, I would go to grad school to study the intersection of labor and health policy. I was working a day job in hospital administration and volunteering with a domestic violence hotline/refuge and with HIPS, a harm reduction organization, and I was playing in an indie pop band that played hardcore shows pretty much exclusively. Being a young queer in the ‘90s, HIV/AIDS activism had always been part of my picture. I was a freshly recovering drug addict (I’ve now been clean for well over a decade); trauma had brought me to using, as it does so many others, and helping others was part of my route out.
I’d survived, by some magical combination of luck and resources, and was starting to put together a real life, and I wanted to make things better not just for myself but for others who were struggling with the same issues I was struggling with.
I’m giving you this seemingly inconsequential personal background to explain how, when the Martin Shkreli story started flooding my social media yesterday, it hit me with such deep force that I wasn’t able to cohere my thoughts until today. My dissertation, which I never finished because my department lost such significant funding that it wasn’t able to support students who weren’t independently wealthy, was on how the lack of state structure in Washington, D.C., where I was born and where I lived at the time, was one of the major factors in the stratospheric HIV infection rate at the time — something that careful and thoughtful health policy has, thankfully, reversed in recent years.
When I was spending time in the free clinics of D.C., MD and VA in the early-mid ‘00s, talking to clinicians and patients about how they were making do with the resources they had and gathering research for my dissertation, I was also working with HIPS. Through these connections, and through my own queer community, I’ve known a lot of people over the years that Daraprim has been an absolute lifesaver for, and these are characteristically people with fewer resources than most and a larger need than most. I’m glad that other drug companies are starting to listen regarding giant price increases, but that would not have happened without a significant amount of public pressure. Shkreli hasn’t changed his personal tune, and neither has Turing (by the way, Shkreli’s claims that somehow consumers won’t see the price increase is ludicrous; as someone with knowledge of how hospital and clinic budgets work, there is absolutely no way this is possible. Whether the gouge happens through taxes or insurance costs or directly, the people who need this medication will see their access restricted as hospitals and clinics decide against stocking Daraprim even if it remains the same cost to consumers).
While Shkreli’s obviously an asshole, a condemnation that seems light for his profiteering like, he’s really an example of our current for-profit health care system at its core and at its worst, not an outlier. Health care is not a service that should be purely regulated by the market — see what happens when it is? It’s a public good. While we are still figuring out what that looks like in America, the history and future of our health care system, something that directly affects all of us on a daily basis, are determined by this tension between the public good and the free market. All I can think of is all of the lives lost, all of the pain, all of the preventable issues that market forces have exacerbated.
After I left academia, I floated the idea of being a nurse for a while, did some preliminary nursing courses, and then moved to Chicago, where I ended up doing legal writing for a labor union and slowly getting back into music writing and journalism as a career that, lately, I’ve poured more time and work into than even my day job. This brings me to this — Shkreli, a passionate emo/indie rock/pop-punk fan — is reportedly involved in backing at least one label.
I know and respect people at and on the label in main question, Collect Records, who are affected by all of these revelations, and I urge them to take a long, thoughtful look at all of Shkreli’s actions and their consequences now that they have come to light. We all make concessions to take money from corporations we may not agree with, as is the nature of work in a capitalist system, and I am certainly not exempt from that — I have made decisions in my own life that I’ve been called on and have to think about and re-evaluate my stance, something that is constantly evolving — but thinking about it deeply, making educated decisions, knowing what you can agree to in good conscience and what you can’t — all of that is incredibly important. I come to this writing with a lot of compassion as well as a lot of fury.
I write this not as someone attempting to condemn from on high. I write this as someone who cares deeply about seeing a better world and a better health care system — not theoretically, in a very real and personal and true way. I know lives saved by Daraprim. I know lives Shkreli nearly ruined, could ruin. This is not about some abstract ideal. This is about concrete reality and survival.
