Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by the investigative journalist Nick Dearden. He is the director of Global Justice Now. He's also the author of the new book, Pharmonomics, How Big Farmer

Farmer destroys Global Health Available from Verso.

Nick Deirdin, thank you so much for joining us our current affairs today.

Thanks for inviting me.

So your book goes through a lot of different issues with the pharmaceutical companies.

And so to think about, you know, where we might enter this conversation, I felt maybe we could

begin as you do in the book with, you know, a microcosm.

One of the examples that's touted as a bad apple that made the news,

the infamous Martin Schrelli. You bring us back to that case as a kind of case study in, you know,

something that we can all obviously understand as predatory and wrong way to deliver medication to people. Maybe you could just remind us

first of the facts of what haven't there. Of course. So this guy was basically, you know,

his background was in finance. You know, he came from a hedge fund and he said by his own admission,

he moved because there wasn't enough money to be made in hedge funds for him. So he thought

a big farmer was a more profitable way to go.

And he was right. And he was absolutely right. And what he did essentially was look around for drugs,

you know, had a bit of a time left on their patents where, you know, were coming to the end of

their patents, but where other companies, so that means the drugs that he was looking at were still kind of had monopoly rights applied to them. But he thought, he figured, well,

I've got a little bit of time left before other generic companies can come in and make these

drugs and the price falls massively. So I'll buy them up. I will then jack the price up by,

you know, hundreds or thousands of percent overnight. And that will make me a nice

income stream for the time remaining before anyone else can make these things. And so, you know,

the most famous case was he brought this, he brought this drug out, which is, you know,

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