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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

#101

Post by blacksmith_tb »

goatlover wrote: post #28
louithethrid wrote: post #25

The day anyone can get dna-programmable yeast and a reactor to grow it- big pharma is goone. What a nice woody sort of word.

Because I'm going to trust the kid's medicine down the street with no oversight? Isn't this kind of like the day 3D printers become affordable, mass manufacturing is done?

If 3D printers were not just affordable but infallible, yes. It would be easier to have a bioreactor bubbling away to synthesize your pharmaceuticals than to try and make a lab-in-a-box kit that was equally robust (more like brewing kombucha in your kitchen than Breaking Bad for Dummies), but either way you still need to assay the results...

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

#102

Post by nostrademons »

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)

Does the manufacturer of a gun face legal responsibility when someone uses it wrong and dies? An automobile? A swimming pool?

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

#103

Post by mandevil »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7
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…

When drug companies issue patents, do they not also publicise production methods?

It isn't even the basics of the synthesis chain that are difficult. Most (small molecule) stuff a lab chemist could whip up a batch of given a bit of time and reasonable access to precursors.

But this is exactly like saying "Reddit is just a few SQL queries, a reasonable programmer could whip up their own version in a weekend." Just like there is only one reddit/StackOverflow/Facebook even though plenty of people have the same basic idea, even knowing the chemical formula doesn't help that much. The trick is in the execution: generating reliable quantities of reliable strength and without any contaminants.

There is a whole field, process engineers, devoted to this quite difficult problem.

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

#104

Post by avdempsey »

fallingfrog wrote: post #55
icebraining wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering lately if there is room for the notion of a conservative anarchist, who questions hierarchy but dismantles carefully and incrementally. Sure! Those are the collaborationists, and are the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I'm only half-joking, see what happened to the Mensheviks in 1917-1921.

Sad but there's a lot of truth to that: if you are fighting against a nation state with an army, you have to have your own army to fight it. And on the day when you are victorious, you'll find yourself sitting on a large plot of land and people and the only intact organization around will be.. your army. And the government you form will closely resemble an army in form and function, and the high ranking members of th…

The natural response would be instead of fighting a government with an army, experiment and build the structures that you would like to see, without dogma, learning as you go. When these structures solve enough problems for your community, a democratic country may peacefully transition.

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

#105

Post by rightos »

amyjess wrote: post #99
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…

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%+…

That's a very left-wing view of things - I don't necessarily disagree with it, but I think there are far less drastic changes that can be made to achieve a comparable result.

You'll have a hard time selling a plan like that to anyone even slightly right leaning - think about it politically for a second. The government decides what drug development gets priority? Remember the death panels talk from a few years ago?

It's viable, but involves a lot of trust in government, so much that even as a fairly left-leaning person myself I'd have to think twice about it.

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

#106

Post by graciouspants »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #97

I'm a bit skeptical about this. You should see what it takes to manufacture useful amounts of clinical-grade penicillin. It's fairly capital-intensive, and requires a special strain of the mold.

The solution? Don't make penicillin.

Even if one particular drug is out of reach, there are plenty of other useful drugs that may not be.

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

#108

Post by miguelrochefort »

nkrisc wrote: post #5
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…

Consider this story that mades the rounds recently as well: people using antibiotics marketed for fish because they can't afford or get access to anything else. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjxwma/people-are...

Also very popular amongst survivalists.

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

#109

Post by alexanderstears »

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…

the US has an entire political party angrily decrying any effort to regulate healthcare as socialist slavery.

Argubly regulation is the problem we're in this mess. Do you think an epipen would cost $600 if there weren't a Government granted monopoly?

We have two parties who love the current amount of regulations on competition - you need to go to an AMA approved medical school to become a doctor, there aren't H1Bs for health care workers, and the government gets to pick and chose who's allowed to sell medication.

They just disagree on the amount of subsidies for poor people. One party thinks prepaid consumption with cross subsidies is insurance and the other party thinks that insurance shouldn't be so binding if you get sick.

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

#110

Post by random023987 »

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…

> super awesome.

This is not super-awesome. Humans have made incredible progress by specializing and optimizing, and this process improves productivity, efficiently, and (most importantly when it comes to medicine) safety.

The idea that we will have people taking the risk of getting sick or dying because they are not able to manufacture drugs with the same purity and potency as pharmaceutical companies shows there is a huge problem with the status quo.

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