40 ms·

Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

119 points by mvanaltvorst 5y ago

elchief 5y ago
this will be useful in 20 years when society has collapsed, but you want to survive
trutannus 5y ago
My first thought was how dangerous this is. Then after thinking some more, I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  If you send your compounds off for proper testing it shouldn't be that dangerous, but that will increase the cost a few 100% most likely Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > If you send your compounds off for proper testing it shouldn't be that dangerous, but that will increase the cost a few 100% most likely > Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well I don't think it's that easy. Even if you successfully synthesize the right chemical, you also have to get dosage and delivery right (consistently!). From the OP: > In response, Four Thieves published the instructions for a DIY epipen online that can be made for $30 in off-the-shelf parts and reloaded for $3. If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it (e.g. mechanism fails, storage stability issues, dosage issues, etc.). Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem. > Shkreli drove the price of the lifesaving HIV medicine Daraprim sells up to $750 per pill. So Four Thieves developed an open source portable chemistry lab that allows anyone to manufacture their own Daraprim for just 25 cents apiece. The article calls Daraprim and "HIV medicine" throughout, but isn't that misleading? I thought it was an anti-parasitic (that may be used by HIV patients to treat secondary infections).
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      > If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it. Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem. DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!)
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!) Yeah, the answer is $600 is far too expensive. IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation (e.g. limiting the profit margin on generics or even drugs more generally), or some kind of boutique government-owned generic maker tasked with being a manufacturer of last resort and selling generics at its cost (which should be higher than a non-price-gouging private company, so it works to put a price-ceiling on those companies and also acts as insurance against unavailability).
        ur-whale 5y ago
        > IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation IMHO, the solution is actually less regulation. If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        The computer market is not particularly regulated, yet we still have international big tech monopolies stifling competition. I think the US simultaneously needs: • less regulation, to reduce barriers-to-entry • more regulation, to allow competition Normally, I'd be concerned about reduced regulations having safety implications, but the existing situation is already unsafe.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  Also, the article mentions an MIT professor's safety concerns, but, upon reflection, given the conditions some of these drugs are meant to treat, the error rate would have to be very high to make it worse than no treatment.
- hirundo 5y ago
  > I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option. Regulatory capture.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    That and market failure.
    - dgb23 5y ago
      I'm not sure if life saving medicine should or even can be understood through economic equilibrium. This is ultimately a question of ethics, politics and sheer survival. This isn't a market in the first place and it doesn't help that we pretend it is.
      - lend000 5y ago
        Everything is a market. Someone has to produce a finite supply for some cost. There is some demand for the medicine. Suppliers can be incentivized to produce by demand through price. Look up the percentage of all drugs that were invented in the United States. Socialized medicine is subsidized by capitalist innovation overseas. There are so many problems with the US system, but they have more to do with regulatory capture (including difficulty of FDA approval + difficulty of becoming a doctor) and price transparency than anything else.
        cloudfifty 5y ago
        Sit tight and assess! This is like reading a propaganda pamphlet with the inevitable very long term "it may work, we'll have to wait and see in a decade or two, but until then at least our profits are not affected"-solutions.
        lend000 5y ago
        Did you forget to read the last part, describing the major things that need to change?
- mperham 5y ago
  It makes more sense when you realize that much of US population is ok with vulture capitalism: extract as much rent as possible from everything, no matter the consequence to society or harms done, especially if focused on poor people. See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.
petermcneeley 5y ago
Not an Anachist but I wonder how much of the danger here is due to the law. Ideally they would simply be selling the epipencils and doing testing etc but there is no way they would be able to do this. So instead the best they can do is create DIY kits. I wonder how far they can legally push the DIY kit. Can they ship you supplies with the kit? Can they ship you expresso-like packs for your DIY machine?
- mastazi 5y ago
  This reminds me of vaping in Australia: since vaping liquids containing nicotine are illegal, people make their own liquid by mixing nicotine-free vaping liquids (which are legal) with nicotine extracted from products such as Nicorette (which are also legal) - unfortunately some just go back to cigarettes rather than going through all that trouble. Luckily, I didn't go back to the stinkies - I never smoked again (I also quit vaping after a while, quitting vaping is not hard because it's not nearly as addictive as ciggies are).
- Qem 5y ago
  Well, if people can even successfully defend against murder charges if they acted in self-defense, to preserve one's own life, why should they not be able to defend against piracy/drug laws if the alternative is death? Some medicines are too expensive, in absence of a proper public health system, and being unable to pay means certain death to some people.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  They should just call them nutritional supplements so they'll be completely unregulated for either efficacy or safety.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Supplements aren't unregulated. They're treated as food. And I'd bet there's some bit of regulation somewhere that says you can't arbitrarily label a medicine as a supplement.
    - 5y ago
tehjoker 5y ago
This is pretty interesting, but skimming the article I didn't see any mention of lab testing the purity and quantity of drugs produced. There's a lot of fiery talk but how do we know that the results are usable?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  This is a very important step in the production of medications. We need to know that nothing went wrong with the synthesis and we aren't ingesting toxic and potentially fatal byproducts. Dosage can also be wrong if measuring an impure compound.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Imagine injecting too much epi! Not good!
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Honestly my concern is too little. Say you make a measurement expecting 90% purity but its actually 60%. You're getting way less epi and may continue struggling to breathe after taking the shot. Scary shit.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
> After a few minutes of gloating about pharma bro Martin Shkreli “rotting at Fort Dix” for raising the price of Daraprim, a lifesaving HIV medicine, from $13 to $750, Laufer grew serious. “It’s been two years, but despite everything that’s happened, the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said. Shkreli went to jail for securities fraud- not raising the price of a drug. I think Shkreli was a convenient scapegoat for the pharmaceutical industry though. All the time and energy people spent angry at Shkreli was time spent not directing their anger at the industry that allowed it.
- trhway 5y ago
  while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who really need it (like high risk groups, etc.) - the situation pretty similar to opioids. And if one looks at those 3rd, 4th, ... boosters - sales tactic wise it looks eerily similar to the jacking up the "12hr" opioid dose approach as it simultaneously increases sales and creates addiction). I wonder if several years down the road we'll see vaccine trials/settlements similar to the opioids ones.
  - snakeboy 5y ago
    Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life. I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.
    - trhway 5y ago
      >Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned on pandemic stress https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-disorder-heart-conditions-covid-london-physicians-b969436.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-... with more expected to come: "Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19. He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early." Pinning on pandemic stress means they couldn't pin it on covid - either it is non-infected people or timing isn't correlated enough. Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?
dekhn 5y ago
I know a bunch about pharma. The folks who are doing this and saying it's cheaper are often completely neglecting costs that are borne by corporations: the initial R&D, but also the immense amount of quality control and regulatory compliance. I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typically with no ability to know if they did anything at all), many of whom, after a few years, realize that what they are doing is naive, and that there was actually a reason for the entire establishment around pharma.
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  There is a really simple number that tells you what the costs of a company are vs its prices to users. Its called profit. So are the pharama companies profitable?
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Yes, most large pharma are very profitable (it's one of the most profitable sectors). As we liked to joke, Roche isn't so much a pharma company as it is a wealthy family that invests in pharma because it's so profitable (until recently there was a very interest structure of family cross-ownership of all the Basel-based pharma firms that was set up for or less for MAD purposes).
- notch656a 5y ago
  Those costs aren't all borne by corporations, just the profits. The cost is the cost of public schooling of the children that invent these things, the invention and development of internet partially funded by DARPA that allows quickly conveying scientific information these companies use, the millinia of scientific research that precedes the invention. The corporation then benefits from regulatory capture, and insanely high regulatory barriers to lock away less capitalized competitors from introducing their own unique drugs. Those who can afford the insane regulatory costs then can squeeze consumers dry. Open up a maximally free market for pharmaceuticals and watch these snakes die. If I want to GC/MS some shit I bought out of some guys basement to check purity myself then let me.
nynx 5y ago
I hope we can eventually have self-contained machines that can synthesize many different types of medications. By certifying the machines or testing them thoroughly, you can lessen the worry that people will synthesize the drugs wrong. I think this is almost possible for a large range of simple, small-molecule drugs.
- aijeq 5y ago
  The point of this exercise is that the regulatory capture effectively prevents life saving treatments from reaching the people who need them. For example, better quality insulin is far more expensive because there's tremendous capture not only in the insulin market but the bioreactors required to make the insulin from bacteria. The process isn't insanely complicated, chemistry-wise, but the fact that only a few can make it and its MUCH better means they can charge more. Another example is one-off drugs for rare but potentially curable conditions. They are often so expensive that they're pulled from the market because 1% of 1% of the population needs them and you can't use that to drive revenue. 3D printing took off precisely because of the LACK of regulatory capture. Imagine you had an FDA synthesizer that could make something common and simple like blood pressure medication for fractional cents on the dollar. You wouldn't be able to find the plans for this like you could for a 3D printed gun, for example, because the technology requires actual expertise to use. So you'd likely be left buying it from some biotech firm who will happily charge a price equivalent to a lifetime supply of all the drugs it can produce. You once again reach the affordability problem. Not because the technology is that far out of reach or so esoteric, but to be able to even get the device into the people's homes who need it you would need to find centuries of deeply entrenched and well capitalized special interests. Pharma would rather you die from something preventable than leave a single penny uncollected. Normally this would be considered hyperbole but in this case it's absolutely, verifiably true. You can be certain if any DIY "3d molecule printer" ever took off there would be heavily armed alphabet soup boys at the DEA ready to kill whoever to keep the interests of big pharma in power.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  That could never be as efficient or as safe as making huge industrial-size batches.
Xenoamorphous 5y ago
Due to the pandemic I’ve often thought about what the ideal model for vaccines and other drugs would be. I understand that there’s enormous costs for pharma companies to bring a new drug to the market, and I guess a lot of new drug prospects end up not going anywhere, but it’s hard to swallow that there’s drugs out there that are cheap to manufacture and are life saving (or life changing) for people that need them yet some/many of them can’t afford them. What’s the best way to fix this? Direct government funding? Indirect one via subsidising the drugs for those who need it? Im
- fallingknife 5y ago
  For one thing we can cut down on red tape. The covid vaccines have proven that the typical FDA approval process is way too long. Trials are usually the most expensive part of drug development, so this would cut down on costs to consumers by a lot.
mrxd 5y ago
> “If you're going to die and you're being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?” It's obviously better to risk using DIY medicine than to die, and it sounds appealing—mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, saving lives with free medicine! But framing it this way significantly misrepresents the issue of for-profit medicine. People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. They are selling their homes, emptying retirement accounts and their kids college funds, going into debt and going bankrupt to pay for life-saving medicine. These guys have given people a new option. You don't have to go into debt—you could instead choose DIY medicines of dubious quality that could have costly medical consequences for you. This isn't quite as appealing. It isn't some radical, utopian alternative. It's just how the system works today for poor people in so many areas of life: education, housing, food, medical care, etc. The rich can afford quality, while the poor have to make hard trade-offs and take risks to stretch their dollars.
- kragen 5y ago
  What if the DIY medicines weren't of dubious quality? What if they were higher quality than the ones that cost US$750 a dose? What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them, and the DIY stuff turned out to be purer and more precisely dosed? That's what happened with Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows, and it's what's happening now with programmable insulin pumps. Also, medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
  - nwiswell 5y ago
    > What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them I can fairly confidently predict this will not happen like it did for software. Chemical analysis has been around a long time and remains difficult for experts to do accurately without context, let alone for a layman. Gas chromatography, for example, requires large and expensive machinery and some idea of what the substance is composed of in order to determine the concentration of analytes. Reagent testing is cheap, simple, and straightforward, but it is generally only capable of detecting whether or not some class of substances are present above a particular concentration. You cannot use reagent testing to determine "how pure" a medicine is, let alone whether the impurities (which there will assuredly be) are potentially harmful. As is currently the case for illicit drugs, I imagine there will be an ecosystem to verify that A) the active ingredient is actually present and B) some limited range of problem impurities are not present, but that is a much less stringent form of quality control than pharmaceutical companies perform.
GuB-42 5y ago
I remember a few years ago, someone made a suggestion, that, because a lot of these overpriced drugs are paid by insurance companies. So why don't insurance companies contract an independent lab to make their own medicine instead of paying ridiculously high prices for out-of-patent medicine? Of course, it would be a proper lab, with certifications and quality control, not some guy's basement, so it would be expensive, but on the other hand, the alternative is also way too expensive.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  The big insurance companies own, at least in part, the large pharmacies. Manufacturing drugs adds a risk bundle of appeasing regulators and liability for adverse effects from the drugs made. Insurance companies are happy to be the buyer and seller as that is plenty profitable without the legal risk.
fallingknife 5y ago
I love this. I have a disorder with no cure, so I will take medication daily for the rest of my life. Worse, it's a controlled substance, so there are all sorts of obstacles thrown in my way arbitrarily. I have to get a new prescription written by my doctor every 3 months, which is a pain in the ass as I have to deal with the bureaucracy. Every time I change jobs, new insurance requires "prior authorization" in addition to a new prescription, so more BS. If I'm traveling abroad, the pharmacy can't ship overseas, and if I get a prescription there, the insurance company won't cover it (and it's more than $1000 / month). Doctors office running a few days behind or not answering faxes (lol) from the pharmacy when I need a new script (happens most of the time I need one)? SOL. Fuck this whole system. I am sick of having to ask permission to get the medicine I need.
hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
This was 2018 and the link to fourthievesvinegar.org is dead, where are they now?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  They're active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/4ThievesVinegar https://twitter.com/4ThievesVinegar But they claim their site has been under construction for about a year now. I think it's important to note that this group is more about political activism and getting headlines than they are about actually producing and distributing the medication.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I can get the medicines I need to "save" me. I can't get the medicines that would help me to die. I wonder what this group's moral posture is on using their equipment to manufacture Nembutal (or other barbiturates). I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess, should the circumstances require that. I know that no medical professional would help me do that, because they would immediately be disqualified. Instead they would have to strive officiously to prolong my life. Nembutal is illegal to possess, at least it is here. That's not like the drugs this group are helping people to make, which are all legal to possess provided you have a prescription, or so the article says. There's no "therapeutic" use for Nembutal that can't be met by a safer drug. As a result Nembutal is really difficult to source (also because it's part of the traditional cocktail used in US death-by-poisoning executions).
- programmarchy 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tsol 5y ago
  >I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess Wouldn't this inevitably leave a mess when your dead body bloats and eventually spills open the quickly decaying contents?
hereme888 5y ago
It all sounded nice and good until I read the part about the microlab using spare bicycle tubing, and wanting drug dealers to cut heroin with PrEP meds...what can possibly go wrong with cutting everh dose of heroin with an HIV drug made through bicycle plastic tubing?
- darkerside 5y ago
  Yeah, that tubing sounds like it could be pretty bad for your health
- jbirer 5y ago
  Not to mention that PrEP is not made to be injected, blood clots and other issues can appear. These natural medicine people are dangerous.
  - waterhouse 5y ago
    Your information may be out of date. Wiki[1] says "In December 2021, the FDA approved Apretude, which is an injectable form of PrEP", and Apretude seems to be a brand name for cabotegravir, which is the chemical named in the OP. (The capital letters in PrEP make me think it's a specific drug, but apparently people use it to mean several different drugs with similar purposes.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-exposure_prophylaxis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-exposure_prophylaxis
    - jbirer 5y ago
      PrEP is a generic term for a medication that you take before the act, yeah. I was mostly refering to Truvada here which is the one that gets most passed around.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  And how does the risk of that compare against: - the risks from whatever else the heroin is cut with (fentanyl?) - the risk of getting HIV - the risks of taking heroin in the first place I suspect that what they're doing is a net improvement.
RickJWagner 5y ago
It's all fun and games until somebody reacts badly and dies.

119 points by mvanaltvorst 5y ago

this will be useful in 20 years when society has collapsed, but you want to survive

My first thought was how dangerous this is. Then after thinking some more, I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option.

netizen-936824 5y ago
If you send your compounds off for proper testing it shouldn't be that dangerous, but that will increase the cost a few 100% most likely Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > If you send your compounds off for proper testing it shouldn't be that dangerous, but that will increase the cost a few 100% most likely > Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well I don't think it's that easy. Even if you successfully synthesize the right chemical, you also have to get dosage and delivery right (consistently!). From the OP: > In response, Four Thieves published the instructions for a DIY epipen online that can be made for $30 in off-the-shelf parts and reloaded for $3. If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it (e.g. mechanism fails, storage stability issues, dosage issues, etc.). Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem. > Shkreli drove the price of the lifesaving HIV medicine Daraprim sells up to $750 per pill. So Four Thieves developed an open source portable chemistry lab that allows anyone to manufacture their own Daraprim for just 25 cents apiece. The article calls Daraprim and "HIV medicine" throughout, but isn't that misleading? I thought it was an anti-parasitic (that may be used by HIV patients to treat secondary infections).
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it. Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem. DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!)
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!) Yeah, the answer is $600 is far too expensive. IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation (e.g. limiting the profit margin on generics or even drugs more generally), or some kind of boutique government-owned generic maker tasked with being a manufacturer of last resort and selling generics at its cost (which should be higher than a non-price-gouging private company, so it works to put a price-ceiling on those companies and also acts as insurance against unavailability).
      - ur-whale 5y ago
        > IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation IMHO, the solution is actually less regulation. If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        The computer market is not particularly regulated, yet we still have international big tech monopolies stifling competition. I think the US simultaneously needs: • less regulation, to reduce barriers-to-entry • more regulation, to allow competition Normally, I'd be concerned about reduced regulations having safety implications, but the existing situation is already unsafe.
waterhouse 5y ago
Also, the article mentions an MIT professor's safety concerns, but, upon reflection, given the conditions some of these drugs are meant to treat, the error rate would have to be very high to make it worse than no treatment.
hirundo 5y ago
> I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option. Regulatory capture.
- trutannus 5y ago
  That and market failure.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    I'm not sure if life saving medicine should or even can be understood through economic equilibrium. This is ultimately a question of ethics, politics and sheer survival. This isn't a market in the first place and it doesn't help that we pretend it is.
    - lend000 5y ago
      Everything is a market. Someone has to produce a finite supply for some cost. There is some demand for the medicine. Suppliers can be incentivized to produce by demand through price. Look up the percentage of all drugs that were invented in the United States. Socialized medicine is subsidized by capitalist innovation overseas. There are so many problems with the US system, but they have more to do with regulatory capture (including difficulty of FDA approval + difficulty of becoming a doctor) and price transparency than anything else.
      - cloudfifty 5y ago
        Sit tight and assess! This is like reading a propaganda pamphlet with the inevitable very long term "it may work, we'll have to wait and see in a decade or two, but until then at least our profits are not affected"-solutions.
        lend000 5y ago
        Did you forget to read the last part, describing the major things that need to change?
mperham 5y ago
It makes more sense when you realize that much of US population is ok with vulture capitalism: extract as much rent as possible from everything, no matter the consequence to society or harms done, especially if focused on poor people. See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.

petermcneeley 5y ago

Not an Anachist but I wonder how much of the danger here is due to the law. Ideally they would simply be selling the epipencils and doing testing etc but there is no way they would be able to do this. So instead the best they can do is create DIY kits. I wonder how far they can legally push the DIY kit. Can they ship you supplies with the kit? Can they ship you expresso-like packs for your DIY machine?

mastazi 5y ago
This reminds me of vaping in Australia: since vaping liquids containing nicotine are illegal, people make their own liquid by mixing nicotine-free vaping liquids (which are legal) with nicotine extracted from products such as Nicorette (which are also legal) - unfortunately some just go back to cigarettes rather than going through all that trouble. Luckily, I didn't go back to the stinkies - I never smoked again (I also quit vaping after a while, quitting vaping is not hard because it's not nearly as addictive as ciggies are).
Qem 5y ago
Well, if people can even successfully defend against murder charges if they acted in self-defense, to preserve one's own life, why should they not be able to defend against piracy/drug laws if the alternative is death? Some medicines are too expensive, in absence of a proper public health system, and being unable to pay means certain death to some people.
pessimizer 5y ago
They should just call them nutritional supplements so they'll be completely unregulated for either efficacy or safety.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Supplements aren't unregulated. They're treated as food. And I'd bet there's some bit of regulation somewhere that says you can't arbitrarily label a medicine as a supplement.
  - 5y ago

tehjoker 5y ago

This is pretty interesting, but skimming the article I didn't see any mention of lab testing the purity and quantity of drugs produced. There's a lot of fiery talk but how do we know that the results are usable?

netizen-936824 5y ago
This is a very important step in the production of medications. We need to know that nothing went wrong with the synthesis and we aren't ingesting toxic and potentially fatal byproducts. Dosage can also be wrong if measuring an impure compound.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Imagine injecting too much epi! Not good!
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Honestly my concern is too little. Say you make a measurement expecting 90% purity but its actually 60%. You're getting way less epi and may continue struggling to breathe after taking the shot. Scary shit.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

> After a few minutes of gloating about pharma bro Martin Shkreli “rotting at Fort Dix” for raising the price of Daraprim, a lifesaving HIV medicine, from $13 to $750, Laufer grew serious. “It’s been two years, but despite everything that’s happened, the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said. Shkreli went to jail for securities fraud- not raising the price of a drug. I think Shkreli was a convenient scapegoat for the pharmaceutical industry though. All the time and energy people spent angry at Shkreli was time spent not directing their anger at the industry that allowed it.

trhway 5y ago
while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who really need it (like high risk groups, etc.) - the situation pretty similar to opioids. And if one looks at those 3rd, 4th, ... boosters - sales tactic wise it looks eerily similar to the jacking up the "12hr" opioid dose approach as it simultaneously increases sales and creates addiction). I wonder if several years down the road we'll see vaccine trials/settlements similar to the opioids ones.
- snakeboy 5y ago
  Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life. I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.
  - trhway 5y ago
    >Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned on pandemic stress https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-disorder-heart-conditions-covid-london-physicians-b969436.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-... with more expected to come: "Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19. He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early." Pinning on pandemic stress means they couldn't pin it on covid - either it is non-infected people or timing isn't correlated enough. Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

dekhn 5y ago

I know a bunch about pharma. The folks who are doing this and saying it's cheaper are often completely neglecting costs that are borne by corporations: the initial R&D, but also the immense amount of quality control and regulatory compliance. I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typically with no ability to know if they did anything at all), many of whom, after a few years, realize that what they are doing is naive, and that there was actually a reason for the entire establishment around pharma.

petermcneeley 5y ago
There is a really simple number that tells you what the costs of a company are vs its prices to users. Its called profit. So are the pharama companies profitable?
- dekhn 5y ago
  Yes, most large pharma are very profitable (it's one of the most profitable sectors). As we liked to joke, Roche isn't so much a pharma company as it is a wealthy family that invests in pharma because it's so profitable (until recently there was a very interest structure of family cross-ownership of all the Basel-based pharma firms that was set up for or less for MAD purposes).
notch656a 5y ago
Those costs aren't all borne by corporations, just the profits. The cost is the cost of public schooling of the children that invent these things, the invention and development of internet partially funded by DARPA that allows quickly conveying scientific information these companies use, the millinia of scientific research that precedes the invention. The corporation then benefits from regulatory capture, and insanely high regulatory barriers to lock away less capitalized competitors from introducing their own unique drugs. Those who can afford the insane regulatory costs then can squeeze consumers dry. Open up a maximally free market for pharmaceuticals and watch these snakes die. If I want to GC/MS some shit I bought out of some guys basement to check purity myself then let me.

nynx 5y ago

I hope we can eventually have self-contained machines that can synthesize many different types of medications. By certifying the machines or testing them thoroughly, you can lessen the worry that people will synthesize the drugs wrong. I think this is almost possible for a large range of simple, small-molecule drugs.

aijeq 5y ago
The point of this exercise is that the regulatory capture effectively prevents life saving treatments from reaching the people who need them. For example, better quality insulin is far more expensive because there's tremendous capture not only in the insulin market but the bioreactors required to make the insulin from bacteria. The process isn't insanely complicated, chemistry-wise, but the fact that only a few can make it and its MUCH better means they can charge more. Another example is one-off drugs for rare but potentially curable conditions. They are often so expensive that they're pulled from the market because 1% of 1% of the population needs them and you can't use that to drive revenue. 3D printing took off precisely because of the LACK of regulatory capture. Imagine you had an FDA synthesizer that could make something common and simple like blood pressure medication for fractional cents on the dollar. You wouldn't be able to find the plans for this like you could for a 3D printed gun, for example, because the technology requires actual expertise to use. So you'd likely be left buying it from some biotech firm who will happily charge a price equivalent to a lifetime supply of all the drugs it can produce. You once again reach the affordability problem. Not because the technology is that far out of reach or so esoteric, but to be able to even get the device into the people's homes who need it you would need to find centuries of deeply entrenched and well capitalized special interests. Pharma would rather you die from something preventable than leave a single penny uncollected. Normally this would be considered hyperbole but in this case it's absolutely, verifiably true. You can be certain if any DIY "3d molecule printer" ever took off there would be heavily armed alphabet soup boys at the DEA ready to kill whoever to keep the interests of big pharma in power.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
That could never be as efficient or as safe as making huge industrial-size batches.

Xenoamorphous 5y ago

Due to the pandemic I’ve often thought about what the ideal model for vaccines and other drugs would be. I understand that there’s enormous costs for pharma companies to bring a new drug to the market, and I guess a lot of new drug prospects end up not going anywhere, but it’s hard to swallow that there’s drugs out there that are cheap to manufacture and are life saving (or life changing) for people that need them yet some/many of them can’t afford them. What’s the best way to fix this? Direct government funding? Indirect one via subsidising the drugs for those who need it? Im

fallingknife 5y ago
For one thing we can cut down on red tape. The covid vaccines have proven that the typical FDA approval process is way too long. Trials are usually the most expensive part of drug development, so this would cut down on costs to consumers by a lot.

mrxd 5y ago

> “If you're going to die and you're being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?” It's obviously better to risk using DIY medicine than to die, and it sounds appealing—mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, saving lives with free medicine! But framing it this way significantly misrepresents the issue of for-profit medicine. People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. They are selling their homes, emptying retirement accounts and their kids college funds, going into debt and going bankrupt to pay for life-saving medicine. These guys have given people a new option. You don't have to go into debt—you could instead choose DIY medicines of dubious quality that could have costly medical consequences for you. This isn't quite as appealing. It isn't some radical, utopian alternative. It's just how the system works today for poor people in so many areas of life: education, housing, food, medical care, etc. The rich can afford quality, while the poor have to make hard trade-offs and take risks to stretch their dollars.

kragen 5y ago
What if the DIY medicines weren't of dubious quality? What if they were higher quality than the ones that cost US$750 a dose? What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them, and the DIY stuff turned out to be purer and more precisely dosed? That's what happened with Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows, and it's what's happening now with programmable insulin pumps. Also, medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
- nwiswell 5y ago
  > What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them I can fairly confidently predict this will not happen like it did for software. Chemical analysis has been around a long time and remains difficult for experts to do accurately without context, let alone for a layman. Gas chromatography, for example, requires large and expensive machinery and some idea of what the substance is composed of in order to determine the concentration of analytes. Reagent testing is cheap, simple, and straightforward, but it is generally only capable of detecting whether or not some class of substances are present above a particular concentration. You cannot use reagent testing to determine "how pure" a medicine is, let alone whether the impurities (which there will assuredly be) are potentially harmful. As is currently the case for illicit drugs, I imagine there will be an ecosystem to verify that A) the active ingredient is actually present and B) some limited range of problem impurities are not present, but that is a much less stringent form of quality control than pharmaceutical companies perform.

GuB-42 5y ago

I remember a few years ago, someone made a suggestion, that, because a lot of these overpriced drugs are paid by insurance companies. So why don't insurance companies contract an independent lab to make their own medicine instead of paying ridiculously high prices for out-of-patent medicine? Of course, it would be a proper lab, with certifications and quality control, not some guy's basement, so it would be expensive, but on the other hand, the alternative is also way too expensive.

tastyfreeze 5y ago
The big insurance companies own, at least in part, the large pharmacies. Manufacturing drugs adds a risk bundle of appeasing regulators and liability for adverse effects from the drugs made. Insurance companies are happy to be the buyer and seller as that is plenty profitable without the legal risk.

fallingknife 5y ago

I love this. I have a disorder with no cure, so I will take medication daily for the rest of my life. Worse, it's a controlled substance, so there are all sorts of obstacles thrown in my way arbitrarily. I have to get a new prescription written by my doctor every 3 months, which is a pain in the ass as I have to deal with the bureaucracy. Every time I change jobs, new insurance requires "prior authorization" in addition to a new prescription, so more BS. If I'm traveling abroad, the pharmacy can't ship overseas, and if I get a prescription there, the insurance company won't cover it (and it's more than $1000 / month). Doctors office running a few days behind or not answering faxes (lol) from the pharmacy when I need a new script (happens most of the time I need one)? SOL. Fuck this whole system. I am sick of having to ask permission to get the medicine I need.

hazza_n_dazza 5y ago

This was 2018 and the link to fourthievesvinegar.org is dead, where are they now?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
They're active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/4ThievesVinegar https://twitter.com/4ThievesVinegar But they claim their site has been under construction for about a year now. I think it's important to note that this group is more about political activism and getting headlines than they are about actually producing and distributing the medication.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I can get the medicines I need to "save" me. I can't get the medicines that would help me to die. I wonder what this group's moral posture is on using their equipment to manufacture Nembutal (or other barbiturates). I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess, should the circumstances require that. I know that no medical professional would help me do that, because they would immediately be disqualified. Instead they would have to strive officiously to prolong my life. Nembutal is illegal to possess, at least it is here. That's not like the drugs this group are helping people to make, which are all legal to possess provided you have a prescription, or so the article says. There's no "therapeutic" use for Nembutal that can't be met by a safer drug. As a result Nembutal is really difficult to source (also because it's part of the traditional cocktail used in US death-by-poisoning executions).

programmarchy 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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tsol 5y ago
>I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess Wouldn't this inevitably leave a mess when your dead body bloats and eventually spills open the quickly decaying contents?

hereme888 5y ago

It all sounded nice and good until I read the part about the microlab using spare bicycle tubing, and wanting drug dealers to cut heroin with PrEP meds...what can possibly go wrong with cutting everh dose of heroin with an HIV drug made through bicycle plastic tubing?

darkerside 5y ago
Yeah, that tubing sounds like it could be pretty bad for your health
jbirer 5y ago
Not to mention that PrEP is not made to be injected, blood clots and other issues can appear. These natural medicine people are dangerous.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  Your information may be out of date. Wiki[1] says "In December 2021, the FDA approved Apretude, which is an injectable form of PrEP", and Apretude seems to be a brand name for cabotegravir, which is the chemical named in the OP. (The capital letters in PrEP make me think it's a specific drug, but apparently people use it to mean several different drugs with similar purposes.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-exposure_prophylaxis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-exposure_prophylaxis
  - jbirer 5y ago
    PrEP is a generic term for a medication that you take before the act, yeah. I was mostly refering to Truvada here which is the one that gets most passed around.
waterhouse 5y ago
And how does the risk of that compare against: - the risks from whatever else the heroin is cut with (fentanyl?) - the risk of getting HIV - the risks of taking heroin in the first place I suspect that what they're doing is a net improvement.

RickJWagner 5y ago

It's all fun and games until somebody reacts badly and dies.