Quote from: Jack N Hoff on May 13, 2013, 09:00 pmYeah, you're right, but they also sell them very cheap. Then the pharmacy marks them up nice. The dealers mark them up the most. If a dealer pays 10-20 cents for xanax bars with insurance, which many do, or 40 cents without insurance, then sells them for $4 or more, then they are making quite a lot of money. Same goes for oxycodone. I remember 30mg being a dollar at the pharmacy. I see them sold for $30 on here.Unfortunately streetelitist is right. Incredibly, despite everything, the black market is more efficient than the legal market in many cases.Take Xanax since that is your example. The company that produces it sells it for 500,000% more than the raw ingredients per pill. Many other popular drugs are also in similar five or six digit territory.Not even the mark-up on heroin from production to the street can compare with this (in theory it could be over 50,000%).This is due to a combination of factors but it is mostly because large pharmaceutical companies are stepping outside the market mechanism.I appreciate that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to build serious pharmaceutical factories and research laboratories, but this does not in any way explain decades long continuation of profits this high. Besides in practice you'll find that research gets pittance. Ignore everything you hear the pharmaceutical industry say about their operations, they put incredible money into lobbying, you can trust their estimates about as much as an OPEC report on reserves. Everything you see or hear is a Potemkin village. It's all about destroying any competition. Oceans of whitepapers are published straight into a black hole. The evidence for this? A complete lack of effective new drugs.It is an open conspiracy against the consumer. What happens is that a company like Pfizer will get infinite IP protection (TM) by developing drug analogs of their existing line, extending property rights far beyond what could be reasonable, decades beyond. They then fool/lobby/bribe various branches of the government to prevent any competing overseas factories delivering to these shores, usually on the basis of "ensuring innovation" or "protecting jobs" depending on who they're fucking. Imports not part of the cartel arrangements are considered to be counterfeits. Counterfeits do exist and can be dangerous, but really this is total FUD because it is very far from representative (and any drug given to a sufficiently large population always kills a couple of people, that is just normal, everybody rational would accept such a tradeoff, just as we implicitly accept that using coal powered stations must indirectly contribute to the deaths of miners). The result is that drug prices are normalized to very high levels despite huge economies of scale. The black market is a model student in comparison and I would say that the equivalent of tens of millions of years of human life has already been lost because of this cartel. Under a real market, Americans would live a good bit longer than they do now, that is fact. Pine hopes that with Darknet markets will ultimately evolve production capability, then real market forces will eventually be able to break the back of the legal drug cartels, because the government is completely impotent at regulating itself let alone Pfizer and the little blue pill is nowhere to be found.