Could Someone Please Hang this Guy from a Lamp Post?*

Don't You Want to Slap That Smile From His Face

It turns out that Martin Shkreli, he of the rapacious drug price hike infamy donated a few thousand dollars to the Bernie Sanders campaign and demanded an audience.

Sanders donated the money to a medical clinic and told him to piss off:

It must be strange, if you’re the kind of person who generally believes he can wave his wallet in the direction of something he wants and make it — poof! — appear, when that magic trick doesn’t work. When a drunken demand for mac and cheese goes unheeded. Or when a pharmaceutical company CEO gets turned down by a politician. Sorry, Martin Shkreli!

Just last month, Shkreli earned the disgust of a good portion of the Internet — as well as Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — when it was revealed his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had raised the price of toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. Sanders even wrote a letter to Shkreli, asking for an explanation. But though Shrkreli quickly vowed that “I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” no change has been forthcoming. He now says that “Until we figure out demand, we won’t lower the price. We have to find a safe price to lower it to.” Seems like something he’d want to get on, soon.

Shkreli has, however, meanwhile managed to find the time to troll journalists and retweet photos of cats rolling around in money. He also, according to the Boston Globe, “says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out.” It did not work out that way.

Shkreli claims he recently donated $2,700 — the maximum individual contribution — to Sanders’ campaign. He told the Boston Globe he had hoped for a private meeting with Sanders to explain the rationale of drug company pricing. But on Thursday, the Sanders campaign said they were giving the money to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington, adding, “We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed.”

And Shrkreli now says he’s “furious” over the snub. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” he says. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.” And he continues, “I’d ask him, what role does innovation play in health care? Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” I guess you can’t always get what you want. Meetings with senators, your toxoplasmosis drug returned to a reasonable cost, that sort of thing.

Seriously, Mr. Shrkreli, how about you make the world a better place, and just drop dead.

^*From his testicles, not his neck.  Death by rope is too quick,^†
†OK, in a perfect world, there would also be some pinata play as well.^{‡
‡And fire ants, definitely fire ants}