Mildly Infuriating

Here the doctor decides, thank God. It means she can prescribe months worth of meds and I only pay 5 Euro. I always have to pay those 5 Euros for any amount (unless it's asthma meds, those are free).

France: never seen a bottle IRL. Used to be blister packs, and if you needed 21 pills but they came in packs of 20, you got 19 too many and they lived forever in your medicine cabinet.

Now pharmacists are allowed to open packs of antibiotic pills and only dispense the exact number you need, and pics like the OP can happen. Most pharmacies don't do it though.

Almost everything is blister packages, which I personally find a bit annoying.
We can't even get normal pain killers without them being in blister packages, and we can only buy limited amounts to prevent teen suicide attempts by painkillers.
That part however I'm OK with, because allegedly it's supposed to actually work. 👍 😀

Here in the Netherlands I’ve never had any medication that wasn’t in blister packs. They are always full boxes. Boxes have anti-tamper seals and a unique serial number that the pharmacist has to scan when issuing (to prevent fake medication). Pills are individually packaged to prevent contamination.

There are bottles as well, but it's not as common. And they're factory-produced bottles that are tamper resistant -- not like those orange ones in the US. So it's basically the same safety as blisters, other than its easier for the patient to spill.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think most of the groundwork for this situation is from EU Directive 2001/83/EC. Medical products need to have a lot of information provided, and it just gets simpler to have boxes with blisters to meet all the requirements, and gives safety at the same time.

I can't imagine how hectic it must be for pharmacy techs in the US. Despite requiring 5 years of school to be a pharmacist here, the job is basically being a glorified cashier... Unless the person has any questions, you simply check their ID, check in the national registry that enough time has passed since their last collection (particularly if it's a controlled substance), collect a package from the shelf, print out a label to put on the box (containing their name, doctor, dosage, instructions), scan the label and package, collect payment, and that's it.

Yes, a sterile lab is expensive, but like normal business expensive. It's very achievable to build, drug cartels manage it just fine.

This bit right here told me that I didn't need to take this too seriously. An actual medical lab is not comparable to cocaine plants in the Congo.

But the pills themselves? The materials and production cost is cents. They themselves cost basically nothing

This is the exact same point from the previous comment. You cannot just look at the material cost of something and say, "see? It only costs cents to make." Go buy a part that goes in a car engine - it's just a few cents worth of metal! But, you can't just take a hunk of metal and magically form it into car parts, there's a manufacturing process and it's expensive. That's part of where the cost comes from. It doesn't matter if you can make the most expensive pill in the world out of 10 cents of flour if you need a $10 million dollar assembly line to process it and turn it in to what is useful. They aren't just taking a premade substance and pressing it into pills, there's numerous chemical reactions and processes taking place.

That's why other countries can afford to sell them for cents - they really are that cheap to make

You start your comment off with saying that R&D is subsidized, and end with saying "other places can sell them for cheap cuz they really are that cheap." In these other countries, the drug company is not selling the medication directly to the public for pennies, it's getting subsidized by the government to make it affordable for citizens. Granted the government is not paying US cash prices, but companies simply are not selling direct to consumers for 10x less than other places.

Look, this is coming from someone who fucking hates the predatory medical industry, especially that of the US. I used to work as a very small cog in it. There are absolutely places where prices are disgustingly manipulated and people are taken complete advantage of. Things exist today the way they are because of corporate greed and the continuance of putting profit over people. We can accept all of this as true, and still recognize that producing drugs at a medical grade, with medical levels of consistency and purity, is a difficult, expensive task that requires resources to accomplish. Medication needs to be cheaper (it's my belief that it should be no direct cost to the user), but momentum is instantly removed from the cause when we use arguments based on a limited grasp of reality.

They're clearly pissed at the pharmacists. Did we read the same rant? Why insult them at tall? Twice. Once in the title, once in the rant. It's not okay to take out your anger at people who can't change the situation for you.