> From 2006 through 2014, the Rite Aid in Painesville, Ohio, a town with a population of 19,524, sold over 4.2 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone. The national retailer offered bonuses to stores with the highest productivity.
> Roughly 80 million prescription painkillers were dispensed in Trumbull County alone between 2012 and 2016 — equivalent to 400 for every resident. In Lake County, some 61 million pills were distributed during that period.
But 30 generic percoset, for example, looks to cost about $14 locally where one struggles to pay less than that at lunch outside McDonalds. Doesn't really seem like a cash cow.
At scale it probably costs pennies to make a Percocet. If the drug maker gets $7 for a prescription that costs them $0.50 to manufacture, and they do that 150 million times in America in a year, that’s a billion dollars in gross margin.
They're available from the distributor at around 10¢ each. So $3 goes to the manufacturer and distributor and $4 goes to the pharmacy.
Incidentally, the huge difference between street price and wholesale price is the reason why diversion is a problem. If the drugs were sold at $10/pill but with instant rebates to the recipients of $9.90 then they'd probably be kept very strictly controlled, even without the DEA involved...
This also fails to account for those that demand a specific brand of pill, and will gladly pay more for it. You'd be suprised how large the difference is to an addict when comparing a yellow pill to a white one.
You are saying that selling something for $14 per month with no information about cost of goods sold or sales volume is sufficient to conclude one is doing “alright”?
That was precisely the point I was making to the commenter I replied to (unit price doesn’t determine business scale on its own), but interesting info on Spotify regardless.
They make the money in volume. They're really following the same business model as illicit drug dealers -- get their users hooked on an addictive substance, then become their exclusive supplier. Except this is at industrial scale.
Most of what is prescribed are generics and they're not expensive.