by Zoë Pollock
Jason Kane shines a light on the seedy underbelly of the prescription drug market:
The gray market is an expanding world fueled by a deepening drug-shortage crisis in which secondary retailers buy up medication outside of the normal, tightly controlled pharmaceutical distribution channels and then sell their stockpiled supplies to desperate pharmacists and hospitals at exorbitant mark-ups.
Premier healthcare alliance, a North Carolina-based organization, tracked (pdf) unsolicited offers to hospitals in its membership:
Over a two-week period in spring 2011, 1,745 examples of gray market offers were recorded from 42 acute care hospitals. The average mark-up for shortage drugs was 650 percent. A full 96 percent were at least double the normal price, while 45 percent were 10 times more expensive and 27 percent were 20 times more. Of the 416 separate drugs offered for sale, the highest mark-ups were for those needed to treat critically ill patients in four categories: emergency care; critical care sedation and surgery; chemotherapy; and fighting infectious disease.
The Dish 