I think I've written here before, that the methadone business can be very, very lucrative. So much so that Bahr's Drugs on Quadra just stopped trying to be a normal pharmacy, and just went with methadone sales.
The pharmacy across from Our Place makes a ton of money off methadone.
Here is a Vancouver story about a suspended pharmacist that makes money delivering the treatments to clients.
http://www.theprovin...6737/story.html
Here is another:
A Vancouver councillor wants to crack down on landlords on the Downtown Eastside who, he alleges, are exploiting drug addicts who are on methadone maintenance programs.
Councillor Kerry Jang says the city has heard complaints from residents who say their landlords force them to use specific pharmacies for methadone or face eviction.
http://www.cbc.ca/ne...buses-1.1108823
Jang says he also wants to prevent people who own a methadone dispensary from owning an SRO where they have a captive population of addicts who need to fill their prescriptions, which can be quite lucrative for pharmacists.
The B.C. government pays pharmacists about $16.30 for every daily dose of methadone they dispense. That translates into $6,000 a year in dispensing fees if a pharmacy can get a single addict to fill all of his or her prescriptions at its outlet.
That $16.30 is more or less pure profit, it does not include the cost of the product. So every time a guy or gal walks up to the window on the west side of the Pandora pharmacy, the owner gets $16.30.
This article says you can get up to $20 per dose in profit (less labour costs):
Pharmacists who dispense methadone receive a dispensing fee – up to a maximum of $10 – as well as up to two cents per millilitre for methadone and $7.70 per claim for each witnessed ingestion, the B.C. Ministry of Health says. At nearly $20 for a typical dose, that could add up to more than $7,000 if someone got his or her prescription filled at the same pharmacy all year.
http://www.theglobea...rticle16193869/
So if you have a pharmacy that sees 100 users per day, that's up to $2000/day, or $60,000/month, or $720,000/yr. just in methadone profits. Considering the size of the Pandora pharmacy, their rent is likely under $3000/mo.
The number of BC users has gone from about 6,800 in 2001, to over 14,000 today, including nearly 3,000 on the Island, according to these stats:
http://www.health.go...one-2011-12.pdf ****PDF
That same publication says "The numbers of BC pharmacists and pharmacies dispensing methadone for maintenance purposes have more than doubled since 2001/2002."
The program cost has gone from under $20M to over $45M in that same time span.
This article talks about cash kickbacks to patients in Surrey, who then use the cash to immediately buy street drugs:
http://www.canada.co...e3-463d37b78956
Information here says there are only 8 clinics on the Island (if I include Powell River), effective October 2013.
http://www.opiateadd...tory/bc_clinics
If that's accurate it means each clinic could be serving 375 customers each. Which could mean daily profits of up to $7,500, or $2.75M per year for each location.