>>Penicillin still works, and all the talk about the broad spectrum antibiotics etc is mostly sales pitch.

Nope. Penicillin is effectively useless against many organisms- even Staph Aureus for at least two decades to my certain knowledge. Rely on penicillin to treat infections = people die, simple as that. Staph also has developed resistance against newer variants which is what the hospital super bug/MRSA scare is all about.

>>Also, now even here you can't buy it in a regular pharmacy without a prescription, by a simple hospital fiat, a little memo that was passed to retail. No law was changed. And the explanation was that same yarn about resistant strains etc. At the same time, you can buy the same antibiotics if you say you need it for your dog or cat. Or cow, for that matter. When they feed cattle antibiotics, you don't hear the industry complaining about creating resistant strains.

Certainly it sounds as if overuse of antibiotics in animals is causing resistance. So? Two wrongs don't make a right.

See here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21702647

>>On top of the actual cost of research and development, the pharma slaps the amount they might have earned if they gambled on Walmart Street as cost and thus inflates the cost price by an imaginary amount they didn't spend.

They make a big return otherwise it's not worth the risk. The problem today is there have been no new classes of antibiotics since the 1980s and it's not good business to take the risk. Meanwhile NDM-1 starts to make even the most powerful carbapenems obsolete. Seems to me we may have cause to regret resenting pharmaceutical profits once the worst happens.