Given the level of education nowadays and the wide access to knowledge, I'm convinced that it's legitimate that the average person should at least have the basic medical knowledge, let's say equal to what a doctor in the 30's had known, and be able to treat 90% of the diseases that he/she encounter in his life.
An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
121–130 of 286 posts
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 you…
This is quite false on many levels.
The problem is actually created by the government in the first place. If you fix the length of the patents or eliminate the patents in the first place the cost of drugs will drop close to the cost to produce them.
Monopolies are well studied in economics and the effects of monopoly pricing due to government granted patents are what we see here, this is a government created problem not a free market one.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#123That 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…
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…
I am astonished that a couple of the biggest insurance companies in the US haven't banded together to form a drug manufacturing co-op. Find stuff that's off-patent and build generics for things like epi-pens. The best bit (to my thinking) is after doing this to just a few drugs, the insurance companies would have a very big negotiating stick to go after other companies pricing off-patent drugs way over cost.
If I knew a thing about pharma manufacturing I'd be spending my time trying to do this.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#124We 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…
There is nothing wrong with personal responsibility, the issue starts and ends with the patent system.
Patents are government granted monopolies, reducing the length or eliminating the exclusivity of patents would solve the high price to consumer problem completely.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree that trusting the government is out of the question, perhaps we could try an open source solution. Publish drug data, studies, manufacturing knowledge, and all of the usual pages of warnings, indications, contraindications, pharmacokinetics, etc. GitDrugs.org? I think India might have the right strategy with prioritizing human need over economic factors, at least in the short term. I think the problem with funding is a multidisciplinary one, unrelated to how much they can charge for the product. If we can figure out how to match problems->researchers->funding efficiently and effectively, finding drugs and researching existing ones won't be a problem.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think people understand just how quickly the liver, kidneys, hormone levels, your whole body can be destroyed in the blink of an eye by bad drugs. I would say, I've seen more than a few HN contributors have a less than cautious attitude toward recreational drugs. Drugs, period, without proper knowledge and guidance can do irreparable harm to internal organs and should be treated with proper respect.
Recreational drugs are one thing, synthesizing compounds yourself is another. The risk profiles are completely different.
On what do you base this (remarkable) claim? Synthesizing drugs to act on the brain is at least as dangerous as those for kidneys, liver, etc. More than a few amateur drug designers have pickled their synapses into broccoli.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#127> “To deny someone access to a lifesaving medication is murder,” he said. And “an act of theft [of intellectual property] to prevent an act of murder is morally acceptable.” I agree with the conclusion, but for a different reason. "Theft" is the wrong way to think about IP. The economic function of IP is not to protect producers from consumers, but to protect producers from free-riding by other producers.[1] Thus, fo…
I have to disagree on both counts:
1) Preserving a reliable institution of private property is also a "public goods problem", and thieves (of physical goods) are free-riding in a very analogous sense (disrupting the very system that enables the production of things-worth-stealing). That free-riding is exactly what makes piracy intuitively feel like theft.
2) Enabling the down-low production of a drug does disrupt the monopoly that drug researchers depend on to justify doing that research. It is therefore likewise free-riding off of their work in discovering exactly which compounds (by which methods) produce useful drugs. Where a producer or a consumer obviates the monopoly isn't relevant.
Now, I agree that it's a matter of scale: a few hobbyists won't make a difference, but if one day someone magically made it possible to reliably produce Viagra in your basement, then Pfizer would definitely care about that and revise downward their estimates of future drug returns upon learning of the possibility.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#128Earlier 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…
I am astonished that a couple of the biggest insurance companies in the US haven't banded together to form a drug manufacturing co-op. Find stuff that's off-patent and build generics for things like epi-pens. The best bit (to my thinking) is after doing this to just a few drugs, the insurance companies would have a very big negotiating stick to go after other companies pricing off-patent drugs way over cost. If I kne…
"Find stuff that's off-patent and build generics"
There are a lot of companies that do that.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#129> “To deny someone access to a lifesaving medication is murder,” he said. And “an act of theft [of intellectual property] to prevent an act of murder is morally acceptable.” I agree with the conclusion, but for a different reason. "Theft" is the wrong way to think about IP. The economic function of IP is not to protect producers from consumers, but to protect producers from free-riding by other producers.[1] Thus, fo…
> The economic function of IP is not to protect producers from consumers, but to protect producers from free-riding by other producers.
The function of IP, from a government point of view, is to promote the useful arts and science and to ultimately make them available to the public after a limited amount of protection to the creator. Otherwise, there's no purpose in the government being involved in enforcing monopolies.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#130Just push Trump to do what he promised to do during his campaign: allow the importation of drugs. The rest of the world is mostly paying more reasonable prices, it’s only us, USians who are getting reamed by the pharma cartel.