Last Sept. AIDS and LGBT activists created an uproar not seen since the days of ACT UP when 32-year-old Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager who took over Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased its 62-year-old toxoplasmosis infection drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a tablet overnight. The outcry was so overwhelming, Shkreli quickly agreed to drop the price, though a new price has yet to be announced.
Turing is based in Manhattan which prompted New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to announce Monday that he is looking into whether the company may have violated antitrust laws by restricting distribution of Daraprim in order to impede development of a generic drug as competition—rather than a specific investigation into the actual price increase, which came to symbolize the unadulterated power of Big Pharma.
Schneiderman—who has a stellar reputation as progressive fighter for public integrity and economic and social justice (he received as huge an ovation at the 2012 Netroots Nation as did Elizabeth Warren)—sent a letter to Turing on Monday.
“While competition might ordinarily be expected to deter such a massive price increase, it appears that Turing may have taken steps to prevent that competition from arising,” said the letter, signed by the AG’s chief of the antitrust bureau, Eric J. Stock, according to The New York Times. The letter asks Turing to contact the AG’s office immediately and tells the company to “retain all documents that are potentially relevant to this inquiry.”
Neither Shkreli nor a Turing and spokesperson replied to The Times request for comment.
Turing has apparently removed Daraprim from distribution by regular wholesalers and retail drugstores, though it is available through restricted distribution for hospitals and Walgreens’ specialty pharmacy.
Last week, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called on the Federal Trade Commission to also investigate whether Turing—and other drug companies such as Celgene, makers of the cancer drugs Thalomid and Revlimid—might be violating antitrust laws by using restricted distribution.
“Some companies may be combining a substantial price increase for a prescription medication with a closed distribution system,” Klobuchar wrote in a letter to FTC Chair Edith Ramirez, The Times reported. “If the restricted distribution prevents or delays generic competition, it could subject consumers to unnecessarily high prescription drug prices.”
Ramirez told senators at a hearing last week that monitoring the pharmaceutical industry was a “top priority for us.”
Drug pricing and restricting distribution could become a major campaign issue this year since Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, requested information from Turing about its sharp drug price increase—a deadline missed by Turing last Friday.
The Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin applauded the New York attorney general’s move to investigate Turing.
“We are thrilled that Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is answering HRC’s call to get to the bottom of whether Turing and CEO Martin Shkreli violated antitrust laws by limiting distribution of a drug that is essential to the lives of medically vulnerable people, including those living with HIV, and women who are pregnant,” Griffin wrote. “This is a promising first step to holding Shkreli accountable for greedy price gouging, as well as his failure to live up to a recent promise to roll back the egregious price hike. We will continue to call on Turing to restore fair pricing for Darapirm, and urge our nation’s elected officials to tackle with vigor the deep problems in our nation’s drug pricing system.”
HRC is asking its more than 1.5 million members and supports to keep up the pressure on Turing by using the hashtag #rollitback to rollback the price of the drug immediately.