STOP ME BEFORE I READ AGAIN (2015 EDITION)

It’s Banned Books Week again.

Or, as I like to call it, “Reading Suggestions Week”.

I’ve written before about why this still matters. You can read that here. My opinion hasn’t really changed since then.

I also invite you to read the post that inspired my post, which goes into more detail and provides a more global perspective.

As always, you can visit the American Library Association for a list of the books that are most upsetting the Cultural Guardians these days.

Next year may see a new addition: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, which tells the story of Lacks, a tobacco farmer who was dying in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, when her cancer cells were harvested without her consent, which led to one of the most important medical breakthroughs in modern medicine.

A woman in Tennessee wants it banned from schools because it’s pornography. Really:

Jackie Sims, mother to a 15-year-old sophomore at L&N STEM Academy in Knoxville, told the local news station WBIR she was “shocked that there was so much graphic information in the book.” She cited one passage describing Lacks’ husband’s infidelity and another concerning Lacks’ discovery of a tumor on her cervix.

“I consider the book pornographic,” Sims said, adding, “There’s so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that’s the problem I have with this book.”

I don’t think that word means what she thinks it means. But then a lot of people make that mistake.

True story: I remember browsing in a video store once and overhearing a woman returning a tape (this was in 1990s, children) complaining that it was “pure pornography”.

The offending video: Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Anyway.

The kicker of the Henrietta Lacks story is that the school actually provided Sims’ son with an alternate text according to district policy so he wouldn’t be exposed to cervix porn. As always, that’s not good enough: Sims wants to keep all kids from reading it.

Same as it ever was.

Guess what book I’m going to try and find a copy of now?

Reading what I ain’t supposed to,

This is dF

WHAT’S THE POINT OF CURING DISEASES IF YOU CAN’T MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS DOING IT?

You all know by now about Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who acquired the rights to Daraprim (a drug that treats toxoplasmosis, a parasitic affliction that affects people with compromised immune systems – i.e. AIDS sufferers), jacked up the price 5,000%, then had the nerve to be surprised at all the outrage.

Shkreli eventually caved (sort of) and agreed to lower the price of Daraprim, although by how much we don’t know yet. Still, the whole episode is worth a half-assed blog post, so here are a few comments from me:

1. Shkreli/Turing isn't the only company buying old, neglected drugs and turning them into costly “specialty” drugs.

2. Before Shkreli backed off, he basically doubled down and defended the price increase (even saying it was too low by his standards), saying the profits would go to R&D to improve the drug. But as The Atlantic has pointed out, it’s not that straightforward:

Medical research is extremely expensive. Except that most of the key innovation is still coming from academic medical centers, funded by taxpayers. Pharmaceutical companies then take that innovation and turn it into a marketable product. That costs money, but not billions of dollars. How anything could justify a drug costing hundreds or thousands of dollars—in the case of the hepatitis C medication Sovaldi, which costs $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment—while still clearing a 30-percent industry-wide profit margin is difficult to conceive. It might be easier to conceive if budgets were transparent. But, as Gregg Gonsalves, co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School emphasized to me, no major pharmaceutical company has ever been willing to disclose how much it actually spends on research and development.

3. Check out this chart showing how US drug prices are way higher than in other countries, then spend some time pondering as to just why this is. (SPOILER: No, the answer is not Obamacare.)

4. Even if you have a really good and sound business reason to do something like this, you might want to convey that to the public in a way that doesn’t make you sound like an unapologetic greedy Wall Street dick – especially in an age where social media backlash can be harsh.

5. Put another way: you know you’ve probably overstepped the limits of acceptable unfettered capitalist greed when even Donald Trump calls yr sweet business deal and subsequent public response to critics a jackhole thing to do.

6. On the plus side, Shkreli has probably done more to revive the debate over the insane level of healthcare costs in America – as well as the questionable ethics of Wall Street – than anything Bernie Sanders could (and has) come up with. And with probably five times the media coverage.

Progress!

I guess.

It’s just business,

This is dF