Lots. It's not just a profit, it is a profit beyond the wildest dreams of the biggest free-market ideologue that ever lived, and it is at the expense of people's lives and health. These bits of info below don't even begin to cover the problems with this industry.

Testing of these drugs takes place on the poor and desperate and on people of third-world countries, who often don't understand what they are getting into; moreover, testing has been done on people who had not even given consent.

If you have seen the film, The Constant Gardener, John Le Carre, who researched and wrote the book, has said in interviews that the reality is far worse than what we see in the film. In the film, drug companies test their drugs in Africa because it is much cheaper. When problems occur they can hide them; and no one sues them. The narrative, in which such testing causes the deaths of a number of people, is based on a true story in Nigeria. Le Carre said that that if Big Pharma wants to bring a new drug onto the market now, they never go directly to the people. They negotiate via the third-world government and strike a deal.

Testing is done on animals, and many, including me, do not believe we have the right to torture animals for our gain.

About the R&D costs--Big Pharma uses this as an excuse for the prices it charges for drugs, but in fact the taxpayers pay for their R&D, which Public Citizen has pointed out.

From The NYT, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244:

Since the United States is the major profit center, it is simply good public relations for drug companies to pass themselves off as American, whether they are or not. It is true, however, that some of the European companies are now locating their R&D operations in the United States. They claim the reason for this is that we don't regulate prices, as does much of the rest of the world. But more likely it is that they want to feed on the unparalleled research output of American universities and the NIH. In other words, it's not private enterprise that draws them here but the very opposite—our publicly sponsored research enterprise.

This has led to the appalling corruption of universities, to mention just one outcome of this practice.

To add to this, the industry is not innovative, and engages in the unethical practice of making infinitesimal changes to existing expensive drugs in order to get new patents and charge whatever the hell they want until the patent runs out:

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?

The Big Pharma lobby is one of the most powerful in this country, and will do anything to protect its way of business, markets, etc. Their prices are beyond gouging, with markups in the hundreds and thousands of percentage points.

Paying for these drugs is not a problem just for the poor. As the economy continues to struggle in the US, the largest market in the world for drugs, health insurance is shrinking. Employers are requiring workers to pay more of the costs themselves, and many are dropping health benefits. Since prescription drug costs have been rising exponentially, payers are shifting costs to individuals. The result is that more people have to pay a greater fraction of their drug bills out of pocket.

Other countries, such as Canada, do not allow Big Pharma to sell their drugs at such outrageous markups, which is why we have bus trips being organized to take elderly people over the border to purchase their drugs.

The fact that Americans pay much more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians is now widely known. An estimated one to two million Americans buy their medicines from Canadian drugstores over the Internet, despite the fact that in 1987, in response to heavy industry lobbying, a compliant Congress had made it illegal for anyone other than manufacturers to import prescription drugs from other countries.

Then, of course, there is the fact that Big Pharma has been able to turn the FDA into their lapdog, and it approves dangerous drugs all the time.

The many who believe that heath care is a right and not a privilege for the rich find the tactics and monstrous profits, in the hundreds of billions, of Big Pharma to be unconscionable.

I nabbed your quote from another letter responding to yours. My loathing for Big Pharma knows no bounds, so I jumped on it.