Ask Lemmy

Old people find it harder to get to the shady alleys, and look suspicious at the schoolyard.

They do. The biggest problem, and the reason you shouldn't buy them, is that there is no quality control at all. If you buy black market medicines you are risking taking drugs that are too strong or weak, contaminated with germs or harmful chemicals, or are a completely different drug than you are led to believe.

You are vastly underestimating the markup on illegal street drugs.

That's essentially what they are already doing. If it seems like it should be easier to smuggle large amounts of prescription medicine from Canadian pharmacies, you've made an error in your assumptions. But the basic building blocks of street drugs are the same as those of prescriptions. Opioids make up the most powerful pain killers. Fentanyl is an opioid that is common because it is easy to make and its high potency allows it to be cut with fillers and stretched further, increasing profit. Somewhere along the line, somebody experimented with mixing fillers into their grandmother's pain medicine and it was a big fucking success. The feds chase them to Mexico when business booms, cartels take notice, kill them and sell their recipe instead of chronic (or was it kronic?) cannabis, which is no longer as profitable. The cycle repeats often, everywhere in the world, depending on what's locally available.

The profit margins are low because it's easy and cheap. There are a lot of places already doing this and they have real (mostly international) businesses dealing with medication from real pharmaceutical companies. Ask a trans person or a serious bodybuilder for recommendations.

The first rule of illegal prescription drug mule club is you do not talk about illegal prescription drug mule club.

It's way easier to produce cocaine than it is to produce adderall and insulin? 🤷‍♂️

And, to be fair, some do. There's a black market for baby formula, FFS. I'm sure OTC and prescription drugs are also sold by gangs. Especially when it comes to black markets selling things stolen by porch pirates that don't even know what they stole until they open the packages.

Modern medicine is full of legal narcotics (anything Big Pharma makes is a legal narcotic). Things like cocaine, meth, and others that are "controlled" are in this state because of one thing: profit margins for Big Pharma.