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.

Is that before or after insurance? Some quick googling and all I can find is anywhere from 100s of millions to 10s of billions.

Pretty sure Netflix and Spotify do alright with less than that.

And it’s not even accounting for those premium tier subscriptions that come with trendy new formulations not yet acknowledged as dangerous.

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”?

FYI, Spotify has only ever lost money:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

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.