I can't tell if you are serious but strong opioid painkillers are inexpensive to manufacture and many have been out of patent for decades. They're significantly

I can't tell if you are serious but strong opioid painkillers are inexpensive to manufacture and many have been out of patent for decades. They're significantly cheaper than e.g. the pentobarbital* that Oregon physicians prescribe for assisted dying. Despite what people on my Facebook feed say, Big Pharma isn't making big money off of any of the old standbys like morphine, oxycodone, hydromorphone, etc. The prices a patient sees are unrepresentative of the actual cost of drugs to health care providers. A few years ago a friend got a shot of hydromorphone in the ER for kidney stone pain and the line item on the bill was like $200. About 1% of that would represent the cost of replenishing the consumed Dilaudid, maybe another 2% for a disposable syringe. As for where the other 97% came from, see: many lengthy tomes about American health care. *Pentobarbital itself is also cheap/easy to manufacture in volume and has been out of patent for a very long time, but nowadays it is a niche drug so the overhead costs are higher.