Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.

In this scenario the addictive product has the margins of a generic commodity and 75 competing suppliers. Getting the customer addicted has close to zero returns because the margins are thin and the customer's future purchases are more likely than not going to a random competitor rather than you. Notice how little advertising you see for things like flour or onions. If something is completely fungible and commoditized the incentive to push it on you is minimized.

And retailers have the opposite incentive, because making a $0.05 margin on a bottle of pills once a month is worth far less to them than not having someone who is a repeat customer lose their job to addiction or die of an overdose and then stop buying all of their other products.

> In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves.

If the drug dealers don't need to do any pushing then why do they spend so much time and effort on pushing? It'd have to be because pushing gets results, and therefore blunting the incentive for pushing gets results the other way.