Figures from various government and UN agencies, including the DEA and WHO, suggest that illicit sales of controlled drugs is big business on the internet and on the streets of towns and cities around the world. But how much business?
Have you ever wondered where all the prescription-only drugs come from that are being sold on street corners, in school yards, in bars and dance clubs, on the internet, and anywhere else, all over the world, day in and day out? Or what that trade is worth?
I wonder about it, and I can’t find out. No one seems to have a real answer.
According to what I’ve seen in the media, you can go to any city in the world, and easily find someone selling bags and bags of opioids, antidepressants, antipsychotics and stimulants of all kinds.
Where in the world are these drugs coming from?
They couldn’t all be from drug store robberies, never mind prescription bottles swiped from mommy and daddy’s medicine cabinet or scripts stolen from doctors’ offices.
Hi-jacked trucks? Well sure, that would explain some pills — like for a week in one city. It would take hi-jackings every day in every state of the Union and every city in the world to supply all the pushers, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t we hear about that level of crime?
No, there’s just way too many millions of pills readily available, simply everywhere, that no one seems to know the source of.
I keep having this nagging suspicion that Big Pharma has a special back door next to the loading dock at its factories in those other countries where many of these drugs are actually manufactured. You know, those countries with something less than what we here in America consider ideal law enforcement, human rights and justice systems — countries that State Department brochures caution us Americans about visiting, countries where almost anything that can turn a little extra income is unofficially OK.
Also, we’re told that illicit trade in prescription drugs is a multimillion dollar industry, maybe a multibillion dollar industry. Who knows? There’s no reliable figures.
I have this other nagging suspicion, actually have had it for a long time, that Big Pharma knows exactly how much it’s worth. I fantasize about this top-secret, special section in Big Pharma’s accounting department that tracks, marks down, and accounts for all the ‘lost’ factory production runs, ‘lost’ truck-loads of pills, ‘lost’ plane-loads, boat-loads and bulging rail-car loads of drugs, that simply vanish without a trace and turn up on the streets, back alleys, and shady Internet pharmacy sites all over the world.
Well, these are just nagging suspicions, or my overactive imagination at work. There’s no way they could actually be true.
But I still wonder . . .