And because of trade secrets I can buy "generic" Coke for cheaper. Do you see now how things would be different for prescription drugs without government intervention?
You can't realistically equate the complexity involved in reverse engineering a 100 year old cola recipe to the complexity of reverse engineering a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical.
Those two things are both "reverse engineering some chemical substance".
Are you making the case that old substances are much easier to reverse engineer than new ones? If so, I'd like clarification on how the market age of a substance contributes to its being more complicated to figure out.
Saying something is "state-of-the-art" only means it's the best we've got. I never knew this had any bearing on the molecular complexity of these substances. Can you make that case?
The set of chemical substances that could be synthesized 100 years ago is a tiny fraction of the size of the set of chemical substances that can be synthesized now. A 100 year old cola recipe almost certainly contains only naturally occurring compounds, while a brand new pharmaceutical is almost guaranteed to contain synthetic compounds.
Additionally, creating a substitute cola recipe only requires mimicking the taste and physical characteristics. When reverse engineering a pharmaceutical it's necessary to duplicate the biological effects as well, which is far more complicated.
