Better Living through Chemistry

One pill makes you larger. And one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all... Modern medicine has a pill for just about everything it seems. They never seem to actually cure anything, but they can help. Drugs are also obscenely profitable to pharmaceutical companies because they significantly inflate their profit margins. When I say drugs I do not mean the usual drugs of abuse, crap that gets you high, but rather prescription medications taken to help the body. It seems like all of the best drugs get banned, or they cost an exorbitant amount of money.

I have calculated the materials costs for many popular prescription medications, using relatively expensive laboratory reagents available in small quantities, based on the average yields of published procedures, and compared the cost with what one would pay at the pharmacy. The results should not be surprising: prescription drugs cost 10-100x to buy from the pharmacist.

Getting a prescription for a drug is not that hard to do if you complain of the appropriate symptoms and have an accommodating doctor. However, actually getting in to see a doctor requires having some form of insurance, making appointments, waiting around for hours, being examined, and paying office visit fees. All of this adds up to a whopping bill. A Mercedes does not pay for itself you know.

Pharmaceutical compounds are another area of shrouded secrecy and mystery. Most people think “drugs” only includes drugs of abuse: meth, weed, coke, PCP, heroin, ecstasy, orange cough syrup, etc. Interesting and popular medications run the gamut from abortifactants to weight loss drugs. I have detailed the synthesis of a small sampling of interesting and politically charged medications in this section.