When a product is manufactured in a high-cost country, shipped to China and subjected to a distributor mark-up, the end result is a very high landed price.
Only with hindsight did it become clear that the years immediately after the defeat of the miners and running-up to her third election victory in 1987 represented the high-water mark of the Thatcher era.
Opium and cocaine are cheap to grow, high value and low weight, so the hundredfold mark-up to which you refer is almost wholly due to their illegality.
Runner-up: While it represents a new high water mark in networked media support for home consoles, the Xbox 360 does not allow personal media other than natively ripped CDs to be stored on its hard disk.
The "high-water mark" provision works this way: If the manager gets an incentive fee for taking the fund up X%, he doesn't get additional incentive fees until the fund tops a cumulative X% return.