[quote=The New Yorker]
True, but wouldn't that mean that what I said is accurate, the bottles would be cheap if they were being distilled even further, or only sold in "sip sizes", which is likely. 
[/quote]

The skooma sold by dealers might come for cheap, yes, but the actual, non-distilled skooma itself (Like the ones we should be stealing)? No. If anything, Skooma would be more accurate to the Cocaine with your Crack-Cocaine analogy; dealers would buy the Skooma (Cocaine) for fairly expensive but reasonably competitive price, and than dilute them into a weaker form (Crack) to sell to addicts, without necessarily dropping the price. They still need to make a profit after all, and it's not like there's anyone doing quality control for the Skooma. Addicts might have a problem being sold watered down stuff, but who are they going to go to to fix this? The guards? Even if they try to take it by force, all they've done if they succeeded is loose a supplier, which is going to do hell when they go into withdraw if there's no one else selling, especially new dealers hear about how the last one got attacked for trying to make a profit from dealing with Skooma. 

Dealing with illegal drugs are, of course, highly risky and not always rewarding. There's no insurance and if a deal goes bad, there's very little you can do but salvage the situation. That's why you don't see just any git into the business; you have to know the right people to get this stuff to if you want to make any decent profit from it. Unless Sharee plans on making her crew into a dedicated skooma dealing ship, stealing and selling the skooma is just a short-term job to kick start a more long-term career into piracy. If piracy is a profitable occupation during these hard political times.