I think it can be for profit but it needs regulation on how much you can bleed patients for. Selling pills for thousands of dollars when they cost you a dime to make is simply exploitative.
OTOH (or the other other hand), I'll bet that you could make a strong argument for stopping new drug development entirely. Simply sell existing drugs for as little as possible. It wouldn't surprise me if most of that research has insanely high marginal cost with little benefit at this point.
I'll bet you'd have a healthier public, on average, if this happened.
Under this rubric, "cheap" lifesaving drugs are viewed as an arbitrage opportunity. If a lifesaving cancer drug costs $20k per month, then why should a comparable MS treatment be "given away" at $15 per pill?
Also a huge percentage of new drug research is not geared toward creating new and interesting treatments: it's based on making small changes to existing molecules to preserve efficacy while making something "new" enough to be patentable.