Greetings all. I'm trying to satisfy my curiosity. I'm not a buyer or a seller but a browser. One of the most astonishing things I've seen on the DN is the prices of "codones". How is this even possible that people would spend this much on a product that seems so readily available domestically. It's one of the absolute biggest rip offs I've seen regarding pricing on the darknet. Supply must not be as available as once thought. I mean come on, 13 for a lortab and 35 for a roxy? Wow...I hope someone comes along legit and undercuts the hell out out of some of these vendor. It should be a crime. Why so high? Is there no reasonable vendor out there?
It's simply the expense and difficulty in acquiring schedule II opioids. The pricing, if you think about it, makes sense. Let's eliminate the small vendors who are selling their own script. They get it direct themselves (or maybe a patient) but they have very limited supply. They may have 120 pills for the month. They can do the best pricing but they will run out fast.
Let's look at a vendor who has a large supply of pills monthly (easily in the thousands of pills a month). They aren't getting the script from a pharmacy directly. They are more than like two to three people removed from that. You have the patient who fills it, the person who aggregates all the scripts and pays the patients, and then they sell either to the DNM vendor or there is an extra person in the middle. My pricing is 10 years old as I haven't been to a pill mill in a while. Before norco was a schedule II it went for around $7-8 for 10mg pill. A pill mill visit cost around $150 back then in my area. You can't just fill a pill mill script at a national legit pharmacy. You have to go to a sketch pharmacy complicit with the pill mill. A standard 120 norco 10mg script used to cost $200 at the sketch pharmacy. A legit pharmacy would prob only charge $20 but they won't fill pill mills generally. So that 120 pills costs $350 at this point and it hasn't left the patient. That's about $3 per pill.
The patient gets paid for their time. Say $50. We are at $3.5 per pill. Now the aggregator takes those pill from the patient and prob flips it at $5-5.5 per pill. If the DNM vendor is lucky he comes in now and buys at $5-5.5 per pill. He flips it to us for $7-8 for a decent profit. Not extravagant. A decent profit though. That explained pricing years ago before the schedule change of norco. Now it's scheduled it's much harder to get so you can imagine pricing popping up.
So it's not the vendors fault. People want it and that's the price it costs to get it in bulk. It takes a lot of work and coordination to aggravate the number of pills some bigger vendors are turning. I think the pricing reflects the difficulty and I don't think vendors are turning the type of profit you imagine them to be turning. It's just fucken expensive and time consuming to do it. There are other ways to source pills but that is prob the most common.
People buy them for various personal reasons. I'm a big opioid user and buy them precisely Bc I don't want heroin. I would go crazy with it. The price moderates my usage. If I was buying heroin I'd have a real big problem/habit. Costs keep me in line. Also some people are casual users and this is a relatively safe way to get high. No cuts. No purity problems.
Pill pricing is why we have a big H problem. It's cost prohibitive for most people. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not the vendor who should be demonized. Some might be gouging but they are small time. The ones who could have huge profit margins are the ones with direct access to a script. But they don't have volume. If you want a steady source the price is the price. Vendors I don't believe are making huge profits off pharmas. Decent yes. But not insane margins.