Marijuana Persuasive Speech

Hello I’m Liam Savery and I’m going to talk about drugs, not about how marijuana should be legalised or how other illicit drugs should be allowed in medication, but the access to fairly priced drugs used in medication. Recently in the news a man name Martin Shkreli has been pointed to a lot and has been given the nickname “America’s most hated man” and one would not be considered shitted by the boldness of the nickname. The reason Martin has been in the news is due to the fact that the company he built up recently acquired the rights to the Daraprim drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, which itself is rare but people with weakened immune systems, like AIDS patients rely heavily on it.

In september Martin announced the change in price for the Daraprim drug and had raised it a whopping %5000 compared to what it was just prior at 13:50 US dollars had jumped to 750 Us dollars. This started a media outrage and angered many users of the Daraprim drug as getting a month's supply of the drug had become insanely expensive. This shouldn’t have been able to occur in the first place and there should have been laws
around to stop it from happening, the drug saves lives and now it has been pushed far out of people's price ranges just to make money. How could something like this happen?

Moving into the future, still in september Martin announced that he would lower the price of Daraprim back down to more “moderate” price but as of yet still has to fulfill what he said he would do. In the past drugs have been known to change in price so as to make more profit, but they have stayed at mostly affordable levels. What Martin has done on the other hand has attracted Hillary Clinton and a number of medical organisations to express their concern on his recent actions leading to some horrible comments left for him. This act of still not carrying out his word on the lowered price of the drug should lead to some kind of legal repercussion, but the closest thing to this is the disdain Hillary Clinton expressed through social media towards him and still nothing has been seen from Martin.

One large issue there has been in making the price cheaper was the fact Martin’s company recently obtained the rights to the Daraprim drug and reproducing it was straight away hard, luckily for the public another medical company had just finished testing on a drug of their own that was an alternative to the Daraprim drug and they are going to sell it so that 100 pills could only cost 99 US dollars, which is even cheaper than the original price of the Daraprim drug.
The bad thing about this is that this was the only way to have any repercussions on the company as any future purchases of Daraprim would be near non-existent, Should this have been the only way that stopped businesses from raising the prices to the extreme heights that Martin put Daraprim at, or should there be laws set in place to stop the stupidity of people and companies like Martin and his
business.

To sum up it is clear that from these recent events of Martin, The increase in price of a life-saving drug, and the unethical manner of promising things that have still yet to happen today, that there should be strong laws against this stupid behaviour and actions so that events like this crisis don’t happen at such an extreme level. We shouldn’t have to wait for something like another company to create another drug to render the unfairly priced Daraprim obsolete, we should have something to protect the users of drugs from schemes similar to Daraprim