Sensible Erection | The Great Pill Heist

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

quote [ In a Hollywood-style heist, thieves cut a hole in the roof of a warehouse, rappelled inside and scored one of the biggest hauls of its kind - about $75 million in antidepressants and other prescription drugs. ]

[by sanepride@10:17pmGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

Krutz said @ 10:37pm GMT on 17th Mar [Score:3 Funny]
Yeah, but if they'd stolen it from a Canadian pharmacy, it'd only be worth about $40 million.

cold_water said @ 4:00pm GMT on 18th Mar
That joke may have been appropriate a few years ago, but the CDN dollar is just about at par, and may actually be worth more than the US dollar in the coming months.

That being said, it's actually better for our economy when the Canadian dollar is softer, simply due to exports.

monkeytooth said @ 4:24pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
maybe he meant pills are cheaper in canada

cold_water said @ 5:00pm GMT on 18th Mar
Maybe.

Krutz said @ 6:56pm GMT on 18th Mar
I'm pretty sure that's what I meant. I can check with myself and get back to you, after these overpriced American antipsychotics wear off.

cold_water said @ 7:16pm GMT on 18th Mar
I apologize, too many "Northern Peso" jokes over the years I guess.

Krutz said @ 7:53pm GMT on 18th Mar
It's balanced out with jokes about bad American beer, education, health care, not being liked in most of the rest of the world when on vacation, and just about everything else the U.S. is becoming notorious for. :)

I do still want Canada to take back Celene Dion. Or Michael Myers. I'm not sure which I want stopped more, actually...

cold_water said @ 10:29pm GMT on 18th Mar
You can keep Dion. We'll take Meyers back only because of what he once was...

blackpsypher said @ 10:46pm GMT on 17th Mar [Score:2 Funny]
$75 million dollar antidepressant heist? I bet the thieves are feeling pretty good about themselves right now.

Ank said @ 10:53pm GMT on 17th Mar
I am sure they have nothing to be depressed about.

spite48 said @ 11:02pm GMT on 17th Mar
Don't be a pill.

maryyugo said @ 11:25pm GMT on 17th Mar
The story is hard to swallow.

crwk8 said @ 12:55am GMT on 18th Mar
just think about the side effects

ahPook said @ 1:16am GMT on 18th Mar
... for a dose of reality

lilmookieesquire said @ 1:29am GMT on 18th Mar
You think the media would have kept this bottled up...

brat#3 said @ 1:43am GMT on 18th Mar
No way, this is a prescription for high ratings.

DBDellDesk said @ 11:23pm GMT on 17th Mar
... tablets, not pills.

hippoh said @ 11:38pm GMT on 17th Mar
Serious question: what's the diff?

Wikipedia says something about tablets being compressed and pills being ancient and uncompressed. Is there something more to it than that?

Naruki said @ 1:31am GMT on 18th Mar
You might be able to swallow an iPill.

VictorTyne said @ 3:07am GMT on 18th Mar
Actually, the wikipedia article on pill has a pretty good explanation of the difference. In common usage they refer to the same thing but technically to a pharmacist a 'pill' is a candy-coated ball of powdered medicine mixed with a binder and a 'tablet' is powdered medicine compressed into a solid.

If I was explaining it to a kid, I'd say that tablets are like Spree candies (or Sweetarts, for those kids who don't remember Spree) and pills are like Skittles or candy-coated gum.

maryyugo said @ 11:27pm GMT on 17th Mar
Someone a radio talk show said much of the stolen merchandise was Viagra and Cialis. If true, the culprits should be easy to ... uh ... spot.

sanepride said @ 11:31pm GMT on 17th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
Really? You think they'd stand out?

maryyugo said @ 11:40pm GMT on 17th Mar
Here's probably one the thieves. (SFW more or less)

Naruki said @ 1:29am GMT on 18th Mar
Is that Richard Simmons before he came out?

sanepride said @ 2:20am GMT on 18th Mar
What? Richard Simmons is gay?

maryyugo said @ 6:55am GMT on 18th Mar
Well, no. Meet Mark Ballas (here with Shawn Johnson):

Naruki said @ 12:54pm GMT on 18th Mar
I see... so it was after he came out.

maryyugo said @ 8:01pm GMT on 18th Mar
You should be as straight as Mark Ballas. And as slick. Maybe if you were, you'd get some girls.

Naruki said @ 4:08am GMT on 23rd Mar
If I got anymore trim than I do now I'd have trim.

hippoh said @ 11:40pm GMT on 17th Mar
At first glans it'd probably be hard to spot them.

ahPook said @ 1:12am GMT on 18th Mar
But once caught, they'd do hard time.

Naruki said @ 1:29am GMT on 18th Mar
A long stretch, even.

lilmookieesquire said @ 1:32am GMT on 18th Mar
What a cheap generic joke.

lilmookieesquire said @ 1:30am GMT on 18th Mar
I wonder if their lawyer will have trouble erecting a defence?

Dioxin said @ 1:32am GMT on 18th Mar
Wanky wank wank wank.

It's a pun.

brat#3 said @ 1:50am GMT on 18th Mar
You've really cocked it up this time.

Dioxin said @ 1:53am GMT on 18th Mar
Piss off.

No wait, come back! I'll let you cuddle my rooster.

VictorTyne said @ 3:08am GMT on 18th Mar
No thanks.

The last time you let me do that, I choked it until it turned blue.

maryyugo said @ 8:55am GMT on 18th Mar
Which isn't good fore skin.

Naruki said @ 12:56pm GMT on 18th Mar
Peter Gabriel tells us to shock the monkey, but I think you just spanked it.

stormshine said @ 11:51pm GMT on 17th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
Good for whoever did it. Fuck the pharmaceutical companies. They fuck us enough.

CapnSilver said @ 12:56am GMT on 18th Mar
Not enough blood pressure regulators in the universe to fuck the pharmaceutical companies hard enough.

erich wiess said @ 1:36am GMT on 18th Mar

Boycott them.

Dioxin said @ 1:43am GMT on 18th Mar
Listen to the man. Solitary boycotts work for everything.

brat#3 said @ 1:46am GMT on 18th Mar
Sure thing! I'm just taking these antidepressants recreationally. It's high time I just sorted myself out once and for all, starting with jumping off that bridge.

aliron said @ 2:17am GMT on 18th Mar
I doubt pills cost that much to manufacture.

sanepride said @ 2:22am GMT on 18th Mar
Maybe not, but it costs plenty to advertise them.

micham18 said @ 2:57am GMT on 18th Mar
hahahahahahhaha

oh I wish.

As a chemistry student who has worked in a research setting, and knowing people who are designing drugs. Let me tell you.. WOW EXPENSIVE!

Friend of mine had someone in the lab accidently throw out about half a mL of product she had been working on.

There went at least two grand. And just because it becomes commercial doesn't mean the starting material or costs to make it go down.

maryyugo said @ 7:11am GMT on 18th Mar
In production settings, it depends. Some items for example monoclonal antibodies can be very expensive to make, even in quantity. Others like Viagra (sildenafil citrate)are not.

An interesting example of pricing is Lipitor (atorvastatin). At retail, appx prices are:

10 mg $367.90
20 mg $518.99
40 mg $571.29
80 mg $542.99

(that's not a misprint unless the source (Henry Schein medical supplies) made typos.

Obviously these guys aren't selling what's *in* those tablets. They're selling the brand name, the research cost, the profits, what they think the market will bear, and the advertising.

Most intelligent patients who pay for all or part themselves buy the 80 mg tabs. Those are DELIBERATELY made hard to cut easily into equal parts. Fortunately, the precision of the daily dose of atorvastatin isn't critically important so it's OK to average it out over a bit of time.

Meanwhile third party payers who pay for patients requiring the lower doses take it in the shorts. Just another weirdness, oft repeated, in pharmaceutical pricing. This is US only-- don't know about other places.

maryyugo said @ 7:12am GMT on 18th Mar
I should've noted those costs are for a bottle of 90 tabs in each case.

papango said @ 7:16am GMT on 18th Mar
The cost in New Zealand is 80mg x 30 tablets = $NZ110.50. Which comes to about $US78. Consumers end up paying about 15 dollars per prescription and the health system picks up the rest.

maryyugo said @ 7:41am GMT on 18th Mar
What's the cost for smaller dose forms?

papango said @ 8:00am GMT on 18th Mar
10mg = $NZ18.32
20mg = $NZ26.70
40mg = $NZ37.02

These prices were current as at November 2009.

maryyugo said @ 8:58am GMT on 18th Mar
Maybe I missed something-- you did say:

10mg = $NZ 18.32
20mg = $NZ 26.70
40mg = $NZ 37.02
80mg = $NZ 110.50 ??

If you wrote it the way you meant, it makes no sense to buy the 80 mg tabs because you can take 2 x 40 mg much cheaper. That's even more bizarre than in the US!

papango said @ 9:09am GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
Yeah, it is bizarre. What happens is Pharmac, which is a government body, buys all the subsidised pills for New Zealand centrally. They go through a tender process and get the best deal (which is not always the lowest price). These prices came from the last request for proposals which went out to the drug suppliers. There is a note in the request that says "A rebate arrangement applies to 80mg tablets dispensed in the community. The rebate has the effect of reducing the price of the 80 mg tablet to less than the price of two 40 mg tablets."

whatarethey said @ 2:29am GMT on 19th Mar
Just wait until the patent comes off in July this year. Atorvastatin already has a generic in registered and waiting from Mylan that Pharmac are super excited to fund asap. Expect headlines on cost savings!

EPT said @ 11:08pm GMT on 18th Mar
Think that's bizarre? Purchasing some aspirin in the US to fend off migraines, I noted that regular aspirin (300mg tablets) was cheaper than the same brand's same amount-of-pills bottles of 'new/low dose!' 81mg aspirin. They actually charged more for less.

Krutz said @ 7:43am GMT on 18th Mar
Isn't there a big difference between the cost of designing them versus making established drugs?

Your friend, I assume, had a container full of chemicals (procured at one cost) that were mixed together in some novel way (labor costs) to gain some kind of result in a test.

Wheras if a given chemical compound is known to have an effect and has a recipe, I would gather that's a lot less expensive to brew up, yes? I think that's the cost that was being discussed.

micham18 said @ 12:04pm GMT on 18th Mar
Your points are valid, however in alot of drugs, the synthetic routes are still complex and expensive, even if they have been devised/commercialized.
One thing working in a lab has taught me is that chemistry is expensive.
Sometimes it's simple things like the price of acetonitrile (a common solvent) spiking last summer to about 400$/4L bottle because the car industry faltered and acetonitrile is some byproduct from making something to do with cars (at least that was the rumour we heard).

maryyugo said @ 6:29pm GMT on 18th Mar
Supply and demand doesn't apply much to big pharma. There is currently a widespread shortage of acyclovir, used to combat various conditions caused by herpes viruses. Instead, people are forced to take alternatives such as vala-, gan- or famcyclovir, each of which costs as much as ten times what acyclovir, a now common and inexpensive generic, costs. Why no acyclovir? No idea. Read something about a plant burning down or having some other problem. What? One plant? Worldwide?

Krutz said @ 6:58pm GMT on 18th Mar
You'd be surprised. If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow, kiss any hopes of getting a new motherboard for your computer good-bye.

EPT said @ 11:10pm GMT on 18th Mar
Yeah, but then again, the USN would finally get a chance to do something. It's been decades!

jackbnimbler said @ 1:54am GMT on 18th Mar
I predict the price of black market prescription meds is going to fall through the floor in the next few months, at least in the NE area.

Krutz said @ 2:37am GMT on 18th Mar
If you're already on this stuff, do you really get that worked up about prices?

Oh, wow. I think I just figured out their corporate strategy.

maryyugo said @ 7:13am GMT on 18th Mar
Doubtful. The commentators I heard had information to suggests these will sold for pennies on the dollar in other countries and not the US.

Isosceles Lock™ said @ 8:11am GMT on 18th Mar

manbot said @ 10:16am GMT on 18th Mar
Louis! You and your frriends have sunk to petty thievery to fuel your addicition now? I'm disgusted with you!

P.s GRABBIN PEELS

Krutz said @ 4:00am GMT on 19th Mar [Score:1 WTF]

JOECAM said @ 12:21am GMT on 19th Mar