DEREK LOWE: Thiola, Retrophin, Martin Shkrell, Reddit, and More.

Well, it was not a dull evening around the In the Pipeline headquarters last night. I submitted a link to Reddit for my post yesterday about Retrophin and Thiola, and that blew up onto that site’s front page. The Corante server melted under the impact, which isn’t too surprising, since it’s struggling at the best of times. (A site move really is coming, and no, I can’t wait, either, at this point.)

But then, to my great surprise, Martin Shkreli (CEO of Retrophin) showed up in the Reddit thread, doing an impromptu AMA (Ask Me Anything), which I have to say takes quite a bit of aplomb (or perhaps foolhardiness – I don’t think too many other CEOs of any publicly traded corporations would have done it). But not too long after that, the entire thread vanished off the front page, and off of r/News, the subreddit where I’d submitted it.

Then I got a message from one of the moderators of r/News, saying that I’d been banned from it, and going on to say that I would likely be banned from the site as a whole. After having been on Reddit for seven years, that took me by surprise. As best I can figure, the thread itself was reported to r/Spam by someone, and the automated system took over from there. Over the years, I’ve submitted links to my blog posts, and Reddit, or some parts of it, anyway, has been notoriously touchy about that. The last time I submitted such a link, though, was back in February (and before that, August of 2013), so I’m not exactly a human spam-bot. We’ll see what happens. Update: I was banned for some hours, but I’ve been reinstated.

Lately, Reddit seems bigger at banning people and taking things down at the behest of the powerful. Here’s the original post, entitled The Most Unconscionable Drug Price Hike I Have Yet Seen.

Plus: “Businesses can, though, charge what they think the market will bear, and Retrophin’s contribution to cystinuria therapy so far is to have realized that the market will bear a lot more than people had realized. But in an actual market, it would be easier for someone else to come in and compete on price. What Retrophin is planning is to use regulatory loopholes to keep anyone else from doing so, with no time limit until someone at the FDA does something about it.”