A recent study from healthaffairs.org found that 1 in 3 neighborhoods in some of the nation’s largest cities, including Dallas, are in what is called a "pharmacy desert."
These are communities without access to pharmacies and the needed medication for health and quality of life.
The study found that around 8.3 million of the people in these pharmacy deserts were Black or Latinx.
While Dallas-based Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company is not a pharmacy, it hopes to one day produce low-cost versions of high-cost generic drugs and get them to patients without the "middle man."
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“You kind of have bad actors everywhere along the pharmaceutical supply chain – tricking people and price gauging at every step and the only way around it was to control it from start to finish,” said Alex Osmyansky, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company founder and CEO. “We’re are slowly building that into place and at the end of the day, the best way to ensure you get pharmaceutical prices at the price you want is just to make them.”
The company broke ground in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood in March 2021.
"There are so many products that cost hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars for a single dose of medication,” Osmyansky said. “This facility should be able to do most of those products for $10 a dose."
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It’s a model that could help people living in some of these pharmacy deserts.
“We should have partners available with mail-order offerings and telehealth offerings later in the year. It’s a very important topic,” Osyansky said. “They’ve done studies and if you are in one of these pharmacy deserts your chances of dying of heart disease are actually higher because you don’t fill your medications.”
