It seems to me that this could be equally profitable compared to street drugs if you take the inflated price for common prescription medicine and health care in the US into account. If you source prescription medicine from let’s say Canada or Mexico to undercut the official street prices in the US your risk of getting cought or run into trouble with law enforcement or rival gangs seems much lower. Also neighbors would not call the police on a guy that sources cheap insulin for the old guy living next door, or what am I missing?
That’s essentially what they are already doing. If it seems like it should be easier to smuggle large amounts of prescription medicine from Canadian pharmacies, you’ve made an error in your assumptions. But the basic building blocks of street drugs are the same as those of prescriptions. Opioids make up the most powerful pain killers. Fentanyl is an opioid that is common because it is easy to make and its high potency allows it to be cut with fillers and stretched further, increasing profit. Somewhere along the line, somebody experimented with mixing fillers into their grandmother’s pain medicine and it was a big fucking success. The feds chase them to Mexico when business booms, cartels take notice, kill them and sell their recipe instead of chronic (or was it kronic?) cannabis, which is no longer as profitable. The cycle repeats often, everywhere in the world, depending on what’s locally available.