I'm no expert, but I've always thought that adding much more risk to the lives of your customers unnecessarily is not good for business.

In this market, a better high for less money will attract lots of customers, even if it is less healthy than the alternative.

So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.

Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?

There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.

And: shaking the scene in a way that will attract too much attention, including crackdowns, is very bad for business.

Soon after John Stewart Mill we assessed that markets are not perfect.

Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.

Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..

If its cheap enough to be worth letting a few customers churn, then profits will be positive

https://freesound.org/people/PicassoCT/sounds/848731/

When there are enough customers, individual customers do not matter.

Now we have the unions, we have the gambling - and they're the best things to have - but narcotics is the thing of the future. Now if we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but ten years from now.

Might want to look at the cigarette industry

When the risk is the benefit things get weird

You just need to keep your customers alive long enough.

70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.

I think it’s what customers want though as it gets you higher and closer to that high they’re always chasing. That it can kill you is a marketing feature if anything.

The rest of the economics behind fentanyl are great for drug producers vs heroin though, so it probably doesn't matter?

Tell this to junk food manufacturers...

They still traffic heroin though, which is not stellar for customer's life expectancy.

For big pharma it is great business! Life long debiliating condition, that requires medication to manage... acceptable risk to customers is around 5% yearly mortality rate!

Helthy people do not contribute to big pharma!