I'd mod this up if I had points left. Same thing happened to me.

I understand that it takes a lot of research effort to get a drug into the market. The pharmaceutical pipeline is famous for its failure rate where an overwhelming majority of candidate drugs will not reach the market. Couple that with the incredibly long qualification process (a drug usually takes ~15 years from discovery to market due numerous FDA trials) and it's not hard to imagine the immense cost required to develop a drug. Having said that, I fully agree with the reply beneath mine (rtechie) that pharma is spending way too more on marketing than it should and this increased expense is being passed on to the users. A good example would be those trinkets given out to doctors as well as all those all-expenses-paid conventions.