I don’t know if it’s proper accounting but there’s no way the marginal cost of producing drugs is high enough to cost as much in marketing costs as they do.
> Between 1996 and 2000, they accounted for slightly more than half of the total promotional dollars spent by industry [22]. Although there is controversy about how best to tally the amount of money the pharmaceutical industry spends on free samples, a recent analysis of 2004 figures sets the retail value of samples at approximately 16 billion US dollars [23]. The retail value of free samples has risen steadily, doubling between 1999 and 2003 [24] (Figure 1).
Chimonas S, Kassirer JP (2009) No More Free Drug Samples? PLoS Med 6(5): e1000074. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000074
But marginal cost for whom? The entity manufacturing the drug, the entity that holds the inventory, the entity that owns the IP, or the entity that the pharmaceutical rep works for?
Any sufficiently large corporation is more likely than not to be an amalgamation of interconnected subsidiaries, for a wide variety of purposes. Once you're at that stage, there's a lot of room to get creative with how you structure intra-company charges to form whatever optics you want. It's entirely plausible that one internal entity may charge the marketing entity full retail price for samples, if they feel it's beneficial and have enough justification to satisfy accounting and auditors that it's a fair market value for the product (which list price would generally satisfy that requirement).
The other major cost with pharmaceutical marketing is just personnel. When you have 200,000 prescribers (for example) in the US, you're going to need thousands of sale reps. Otherwise how else do you communicate with your customers?
> Between 1996 and 2000, they accounted for slightly more than half of the total promotional dollars spent by industry [22]. Although there is controversy about how best to tally the amount of money the pharmaceutical industry spends on free samples, a recent analysis of 2004 figures sets the retail value of samples at approximately 16 billion US dollars [23]. The retail value of free samples has risen steadily, doubling between 1999 and 2003 [24] (Figure 1).
Chimonas S, Kassirer JP (2009) No More Free Drug Samples? PLoS Med 6(5): e1000074. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000074
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...