------------
It gets worse. There is a whole cottage industry of subcontracting labs and research groups who do the R&D for pharmaceutical companies. Many of these subcontractors are spin-offs from the academic labs that did the basic scientific research in the first place. And to top it all off, much of that science was of course done under federal research grants from NSF and NIH---where naturally enough the general goals and directions of research grants are channelled to support development of applications in medical and agricultural needs. Needs of course here are defined by the need for profitable products whether they are actually needed or not.
Then there is another cottage industry linked to the academic medical faculties in university and publicly funded schools like UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) where the FDA required human subject testing is done under contract to the pharmaceutical industry. And after the development phase there is yet another slew of subcontractors who conduct the QA on drugs in production.
All of this corporate `innovation' of course is performed to defray, reduce, transfer, and limit both the cost and the risk of drug research, development and production.
This whole system is heavily subsidize by a maze of federal funding on the production side, then `regulated' with indirect price supports and legal protection schemes (copyrights and medical protocols) for the distribution and sales side.
And just in case you missed that crush for all of the research and development at the public trough, the retail prices are jacked up depending on where you buy it. For example, in an emergency room or hospital you pay something like four times the price the drug would cost at a large retail drug store.
Then there is the huge drop in prices in Canada and Mexico where there are chain stores all along the border who sell drugs for USers doing their drug store shopping. I think I've read or seen somewhere that there are regularly scheduled bus routes that do nothing but take seniors across the Canadian and Mexican borders to do their drug shopping.
The question isn't about state regulation, but state regulation for whose benefit.
Chuck Grimes