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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#101

Post by jdavis703 »

mrxd wrote: post #25

> “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. Peop…

> People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine.

I don’t where you live. But in California there are clearly destitute people on the street in need of simple medical interventions like antibiotics.

For whatever reason* they aren’t able to get medical help — and I’m not just meaning people in mental crisis and drug addiction. There are seemingly “regular” people suffering from what should be 19th century style deaths.

* I’ve noticed that EMTs are very cynical about helping poor looking people. I’m sure the classism extends to getting care, even when hospitals are legally required to provide immediate help without taking finances in to account.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#103

Post by nyolfen »

Tenoke wrote: post #76
chillingeffect wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I call Metacapitalism.

Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.

of course, true capitalism has never been tried, but this is what you might call 'actually existing capitalism'

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#104

Post by fallingknife »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #24

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 ye…

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.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#105

Post by cloudfifty »

Tenoke wrote: post #76
chillingeffect wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I call Metacapitalism.

Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.

Why wouldn't a capitalist corporation choose to lobby the government to bend the rules in their favor if they think that that would give the best ROI? In what version of Capitalism would this not happen? What would remove this incentive structure?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#106

Post by PragmaticPulp »

hazza_n_dazza wrote: post #102

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

They're active on Twitter: 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.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#107

Post by woofyman »

pessimizer wrote: post #50
mrxd wrote: post #25

> “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. Peop…

> People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. No, people are definitely dying because they can't afford medicine. They're not taking things they need, they're cutting pills in half, they're diluting injections. When they finally die from some acute episode, what got them there is never recorded. The amount of bullshit I have gone through to get albuterol inhalers (which cost $5 in civil…

Generic albuterol inhaler is $20 using GoodRx.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#108

Post by kragen »

fabian2k wrote: post #94
kragen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for explaining! Yes, I don't know if the current room-temperature superconductor material (which really is room temperature, 15°C) will ever be useful for this; it was only discovered in 02020, so it is very unlikely that anyone is using it in a product today, even if they find a way to apply the necessary pressure (267 GPa, thus requiring ultrahard anvils). You're probably thinking of something like YBCO,…

The new spectrometers are using YBCO, and they are many years beyond schedule. That whole thing turned out to be a lot harder than many people seemed to expect. The magnets are not the only cost in NMR spectrometers, I think you're seriously understimating the amount of electronics in them. You need to detect very weak signals at several hundreds of MHz, that's not trivial.

How weak are they? Detecting very weak signals (-110 dBm) at hundreds of MHz and even GHz is routinely done by Wi-Fi cards and cellphone radios, and GPS receivers detect signals that are orders of magnitude weaker than that (routinely -150 dBm), but only at tens of MHz. My eyes routinely detect submillilux signals when I look at the stars at night, with an integration time of well under a second; if I'm doing the calculations correctly, that's about -70 or -80 dBm in the 100–1000 THz band. PMTs (including microchannel plates) and SPADs routinely detect optical signals much weaker than that.

To a significant extent you can detect arbitrarily weak signals with coding gain and longer averaging times, although if your benchtop machine already takes ten minutes to give you a result, you probably can't afford to wait more than about 36 dB longer, give you another 18 dB of SNR).

So, I'm not worried about the electronics or the signal processing; there's no such thing as an "amount of electronics". Precision analog equipment is not easy to design, calibrate, and build, but you only need a very small "amount" of it, and it can be mass-produced.

Take resistors. When I was a kid back in the 01980s normal resistors were ±20% carbon composition, which would drift by more than 20% over time or if overvolted, with fiendish temperature coefficients. Now you can't buy a ±20% resistor; most resistors are ±1%, ±0.1% resistors are commonplace, and ±0.01% resistors are easily available for a dollar or two. Precision resistors are now made with an extremum of resistance around room temperature, so the temperature coefficient there is literally zero.

No, what I'm worried about is the physics. I'm not surprised YBCO spectrometers turned out to be a pain in the ass; YBCO is a huge pain in the ass in every possible way. What do you think the physical obstacles are?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#109

Post by rootusrootus »

pessimizer wrote: post #84
petermcneeley wrote: post #5

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?

They should just call them nutritional supplements so they'll be completely unregulated for either efficacy or safety.

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.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#110

Post by cloudfifty »

lend000 wrote: post #90
dgb23 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cap…

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.
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