Hello forum. I don't create topics often but I think this is an interesting question to ask everyone. I honestly don't know the answer and would like opinions/facts. The question is:

Is the pharmaceutical industry involved in the narcotics black market, specifically, does the pharmaceutical industry account for a significant percentage of illegal narcotics consumption/buying?

The reason I ask this is because if the answer is yes, it would explain how the USA is supposed to be this gigantic consumer of illegal narcotics, but drug abuse doesn't seem to be as widespread as it should be to the untrained naked eye. It would also explain how pharmaceuticals could be making a killing twice, once by buying the raw narcotics bases dirt cheap, and twice by jacking the price for a pill sky high to the consumer. Or maybe it's all just a figment. What do you guys (and gals) think?

It depends on what you mean. If someone gets a legal prescription of a drug, let's say oxycodone, then starts selling some of those pills, you could stretch it out to blame the pharma industry, but that wouldn't be a logical step of blame. The pharma company legally sold the drugs to a pharmacy, then the drugs were legally prescribed to a patient by a physician. The first step of illegality occurs when the patient illegally sells the drugs.

If you mean that some evil villian CEO of a pharma company is illegally dumping certain drugs on the street, the answer would be an emphatic NO. Why would a highly-paid CEO risk prison and putting his or her company out of business? It makes no sense. Pharmaceutical companies are all highly regulated.

Let me clarify. What I mean is a scenario where some big pharma CEO has corporate operatives disguised as drug dealers who would then buy narcotics on the black market, but not for street distribution, rather for legal distribution as legal prescription meds.

I looked into it a bit. Apparently the black market will pay more money to, say, a heroin farmer, than the legitimate market would...so that would preclude a big pharmaceutical trying to go that more expensive route. It just seems like such a huge potential there regardless. If there was a way the pharaceuticals could save money on the black market, I am sure they would do it. And if there is, I am sure they are. I am just wondering if this has occurred to anyone else.

There are drugs that are hard to get here like for AIDS not approved as yet by the FDA. So they order them on the Internet from outside the country.

There are also none prescriptions over the counter drugs and other things that you can get here that are legal here that are a lot let less expensive here then in places like Germany.

Their are people here who go and buy them here and ship them to Germany for a nice profit. There is a very small German pharmaceutical house in NJ that does that and ships them to Germany. 5 men operation they make millions a year.