Other companies tried to sell other injectors at a slightly lower price, but competing with Mylan was tough, since the EpiPen seemed synonymous with the drug. One injector, Adrenaclick, costs $450, and as low as about $140 with a coupon for a two-pen kit.
“Doctors say, ‘My patients know how to use the EpiPen.’ Parents say, ‘They’re my kids, I trust this brand,’ ” said Doug Hirsch, the chief executive of GoodRx, a website that helps consumers shop for cheaper drugs. “People don’t think there’s a choice.”
Trump gets what he wanted in Mexico
Donald Trump could barely have scripted it better. After a year of tormenting Mexico as a hostile foe, he stepped to a podium on Mexican soil — alongside the country’s leader Enrique Peña Nieto — and got a president’s welcome.
Trump emerged from an hourlong huddle with Peña Nieto and the pair delivered side-by-side statements, embedding subtle criticisms of each other inside enthusiastic declarations of mutual respect. But it was the precise visual Trump had hoped for: a bilateral news conference that amounted to a preview of what similar international trips might look like in a Trump presidency.
.. Peña Nieto even contended that Trump’s hot-blooded rhetoric about Mexicans has been, in some cases, “misinterpretations.”
.. He delivered a methodical dismantling of Trump’s anti-NAFTA arguments, noting that trade with Mexico supports as many as 6 million American jobs. He also reminded Trump that for all the undocumented immigrants and drugs flowing north, illegal cash and weapons are flowing south.
.. “Every year millions of weapons and millions of dollars cross illegally into Mexico from the North that strengthen cartels and other criminal organizations that generate violence in Mexico and receives earnings from drug sales in the United States. This flow has to be stopped.”
.. Later, Peña Nieto lamented that there’s been “misinterpretations and statements that have unfortunately hurt and affected Mexicans in the way he’s presented his candidacy,” but he added that “I was sure that his genuine interest was to build a relationship.”
.. Trump, who delivered his statement second
.. Vicente Fox said the visit simply legitimized Trump’s earlier harsh rhetoric. After the speech, Felipe Calderon called Trump a “hypocrite” for changing his tone.
“I don’t believe him. He is lying. He doesn’t mean what he says,” Calderon said on CNN. “He says we’re rapists and tomorrow he says we’re wonderful, smart, hardworking people. He is lying. And for that reason, I think, I was very, very sorry, I’m very sorry he came to Mexico. I think it was a very important mistake.”
The Virtues of Reality
youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagersdrink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.
.. It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression.
.. younger men dropping out of the work force: Their leisure time is being filled to a large extent by gaming, and happiness studies suggest that they are pretty content with the trade-off.
.. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.
.. any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial.
How Economists Would Wage the War on Drugs
In Mexican villages, drug cartels provide basic public services and even build churches—a cynical version of the “corporate social responsibility” that ordinary companies use to clean up their images.
.. Demand for drugs is inelastic—that is, when prices rise, people cut their consumption relatively little.
.. Demand-side interventions are not only more effective, they’re also considerably cheaper than playing about with helicopters in the Andes. A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America; spending it on treatment for addicts reduces it by 10 times as much. Rehab programs for prescription-painkiller users might seem costly, but they prevent those people from slipping into the colossally more expensive problem of heroin addiction.