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An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

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Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#91

Post by maxerickson »

zackmorris wrote: post #69

We used to have government-funded research programs at universities, now we have for-profit big pharma which by definition creates treatments that cost more. It could be argued that this was by design. So open sourcing cures like this is a natural free market reaction to that. Since most of the cost of any new medication today is research, we should decouple that cost from production. The main reason this doesn't hap…

If that is their goal they are bad at it. Medicaid is one of the largest payers for Hep C treatments.

http://annals.org/aim/article/2362306/restrictions-medicaid-...

Billions of dollars a year since 2014.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#92

Post by fnovd »

fhood wrote: post #50
fallingfrog wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-yo... Favorite quote: "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to." Other favorite quote: "human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another."

What on earth would give a person that impression?

It's what happens when you treat history as a story rather than a lesson.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#93

Post by enugu »

aero142 wrote: post #71
zackmorris wrote: post #69

We used to have government-funded research programs at universities, now we have for-profit big pharma which by definition creates treatments that cost more. It could be argued that this was by design. So open sourcing cures like this is a natural free market reaction to that. Since most of the cost of any new medication today is research, we should decouple that cost from production. The main reason this doesn't hap…

You are arguing with a straw man. The other side doesn't believe that a dollar spent by the government is as effective as a dollar spent by the private sector.

If that is the primary obstacle, you can have a design which assigns money to a private research organization to develop drugs for government.

Also, current pharma will be biased against any cost effective solutions as this will cut their margins. There's got to be some alternative path to research and bring in these treatments to the public.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#94

Post by wfo »

dannyw wrote: post #9
leggomylibro wrote: post #2

That seems both super dangerous, and super awesome. It's not something that we should have to consider. But this is the world we live in, now; legitimate supply lines of life-saving medicine have collapsed for a fair number of people. I understand why people might be troubled by someone actively going out and advocating this as opposed to simply making the information available, but if you're offered medicine with 95…

Agreed. When you actively advocate for this, do you face moral responsibility when someone prepares it wrong and dies? (I’m pretty sure the legal answer would be yes on so many fronts)

The moral answer is obviously no, given the context in which we live. That the moral and legal answers are completely opposite of each other is telling.

Imagine a natural disaster happens, and the strong hoard more water and food and shelter and medicine than they could ever use in a million lifetimes and protect it with guns. Then you tell the poor "in an emergency scenario, here are some options to keep you and your children alive a few more days that aren't totally safe but are better than nothing. Your makeshift roof might fall down in a bad storm, your food won't be perfectly clean, but it's better than doing nothing and waiting to die".

This is what is happening in the US. In this analogy, the natural disaster is free market capitalism, the strong are the ultrawealthy owning class, and the guns they use to protect their property are the police and legal system, who provide the violence that is inherently necessary to keep order in a massively unequal society.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#95

Post by dv_dt »

Sangermaine wrote: post #61
dv_dt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the breakdown of working competitive markets look like, and in this case it takes both government monopolies, as well as well as overwhelming short-term greed on the part of the private companies. Long term don't these companies think that charging outrageous prices for drugs will cause a future voter/government backlash of some sort... or maybe they think they should extract profits now because of a cha…

>Long term don't these companies think that charging outrageous prices for drugs will cause a future voter/government backlash of some sort No, because it demonstrably won't. People say they're angry and then do nothing about it. The US has an entire political party angrily decrying any effort to regulate healthcare as socialist slavery. The drug companies know they'll be just fine. Maybe some token slaps on the wris…

Perhaps, though I think I'm more energized personally voting & with campaign involvement in the upcoming elections this year than ever before. And part of that is knowing that it might help Medicare for all or other universal healthcare options - maybe not this election or the even the next - but personally I feel it has to happen and is worth working towards.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#96

Post by djhworld »

knieveltech wrote: post #76
rightos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a difficult balance to strike - you want the companies to keep developing drugs, you want onerous regulation on those drugs to make sure they're produced and tested for safety and efficacy. But then you want them to be cheap for patients and insurance companies. The best solution is probably to simply drop patent extensions for these things and allow generic drug manufacturers to do what they do best, but if you…

You want pharma companies to keep doing drug discovery why not ban outright any kind of marketing or advertising for their products? R&D spend across the industry is a fraction of the marketing spend. Think of all the good research that money would fund once pharma companies were freed from spending it on advertising.

Whenever I visit the US I find it insane how much advertising for drugs is shown on TV, with the usual "ask your doctor about..." disclaimer at the end.

Why aren't more American's up in arms about this?

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#98

Post by WalterSear »

octaveguin wrote: post #40
WalterSear wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…

Enbrel? They just received another patent extension, too. This is what government granted monopolies look like.

EMSAM

Unfortunately, no other class of drug class has worked, and the traditional delivery methods (ie - pill form) caused measurable hearing damage, just from the trial periods.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#99

Post by amyjess »

rightos wrote: post #70
octaveguin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enbrel? They just received another patent extension, too. This is what government granted monopolies look like.

It's a difficult balance to strike - you want the companies to keep developing drugs, you want onerous regulation on those drugs to make sure they're produced and tested for safety and efficacy. But then you want them to be cheap for patients and insurance companies. The best solution is probably to simply drop patent extensions for these things and allow generic drug manufacturers to do what they do best, but if you…

Ideally, the government should just straight-up pay companies to do drug discovery using something similar to cost-plus defense contracts (and establish DCAA-style auditing practices to keep them honest).

Establish strict price controls, ban drug patents, and make production volume guarantees a hard condition of receiving federal drug discovery money. And the money should be large enough to be worth it. Ideally, 90%+ of a drug company's income should be from federal contracts and not from sales.

And if that turns out to not be feasible, just nationalize them. The federal government can hire drug-discovery chemists and manufacture the drugs themselves.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#100

Post by steve19 »

dnautics wrote: post #45

>A decade ago, while he was volunteering with aid workers in El Salvador, Laufer said a nurse at a remote health outpost told him she’d run out of antibiotics and birth control pills — cheap, generic medicines that even her suppliers couldn’t immediately replenish. “This is ridiculous. They should be able to build their own simple lab” to make the pills, he recalled thinking at the time. This is pure crazy. If these…

I would be horrified to think what kind of havoc DIY birth control pill, s that were not manufactured correctly, might do.

I would say a better solution would be to start a not for profit manufacturer, but when India produces dirt cheap genetics, there does not seem much point.

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