[barry-cotter]

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

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

[ikeboy]

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-shee... puts recent spending around $5 billion on samples. Seems reasonable for actual cost, not retail.