Because the profit margin is Huge…
Drug manufacturing is incredibly profitable. Potentially it’s the highest margin physical product literally ever, according to an article on Not Boring by Packy McCormick, from which I will draw extensively for the rest of this brief story. It’s so lucrative because, broadly, molecules that are cheap to produce can be sold for comparatively astronomical prices — some in the hundreds of billions of dollars per kilogram range — for the lifetime of the drug’s patent.
… so offensive, I don’t know where to begin.