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Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

And just like the black market for cocaine, what you get in that pill or powder could literally be anything, and there’s no guarantee of consistency between orders.

I believe this is more of the overall point being made in a lot of the comments here - that obviously decriminalization would allow for quality control.

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Pressed pills in a sealed blister pack coming from a large pharma company in India is hardly "just like" the black market. All these companies are doing is taking advantage of geographic arbitrage and loopholes in different countries' laws to move stuff around. They're not making this stuff from scratch.

I love how often we hear companies are expected to hire slave labor in developing countries and we should all accept this race to the bottom will impact our own wages and benefits all because of the fact that we live in a global market, but the minute you want to buy drugs from other countries or even just play a DVD made for sale in another country it's illegal and immoral.

The price difference is not wage difference, India does not enforce patents in many cases, also things are sold cheaper in countries without US health monopoly pricing.

S/He wasnt really claiming that but yeah.

The patent thing is the real difference. With the amount of citizens India has, it's the perfect storm. Any company can make anything (but the output is monitored), and the amount of people and their low salary make most drugs fairly cheap.

Or alternatively: that most of us happily accept the lower costs of goods and services from developing countries, but some people get upset that this drags our earnings down because of the competition from their workforces.

the problem is that is doesn't lower the cost of goods and services. If we were all paying the same prices they pay in developing countries for drugs maybe you could argue that it's fair when we accept their wages and working conditions.

Instead companies use sweatshops and slave cheap labor to boost their own profits while charging us a premium and expect us to compete with those workers while refusing to compete with the prices offered in the "global economy". If they want to pay workers at the lowest prices on Earth every American should only be paying the lowest prices for products and services found on Earth. That means that the drug that costs $1,000 in the US should only cost us $4. The movie ticket for $13.69 today shouldn't cost us more than $3.51.

>And just like the black market for cocaine, what you get in that pill or powder could literally be anything, and there’s no guarantee of consistency between orders.

The same applies in any market - my last two orders from Amazon for something as simple as shampoo were counterfeit.

What's interesting about the article is that they claim that the Dream Market was able to enforce a level of consistency, because buyers could rate sellers. An independent lab tested some of the merchandise, and what you were really buying was usually what you thought you were buying.

Just like Amazon the on site ratings were normally pretty useless. Outside info sources like forums and Reddit normally had better results but were still full of constant FUD.

At least the average TOR users doesn't leave reviews like: "The mailman left my package in the rain, one star".

Usually a bad review is very well-deserved.

Didn’t we just read about dangerous drugs in simple generics made in India/China and being sold here in pharmacies?

It turns out that microscopic impurities within specifications can still be a problem if they're potent enough.

Same would've happened state-side if the production was still there too.

So you’re saying it wasn’t just the generics, but the name-brand drugs, too?

For ranitidine, yes.

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