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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#151

Post by dekhn »

kragen wrote: post #141
dekhn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signals are weak, but more importantly, the signals are being detected in a volume wiht a huge magnetic field. You can't even put a digital circuit anywhere in the amplifier. When I worked on the NMR all the monitors in the room were shifted toward the magnet, it would wipe your credit cards, and to adjust the amplifier involved sitting under a multi-ton device twiddling knobs to minimize the impedence. Think of…

As I understand it, the magnetic field doesn't have to be voluminous; it just has to be strong and uniform. It can be arbitrarily small as long as it's large compared to an atom, which is why benchtop NMR machines can exist at all, though they won't ever be truly miniature unless either we can also miniaturize the cryostats and refrigerant supply, or we can find a usable room-temperature superconductor. Am I misunder…

NMR is an ensemble measurement technique. You can't measure the magnetic moment of a single molecule. Instead, you need a highly pure sample and lots of it. That has to be in solvent (I'm leaving out solid spinning NMR here, that's a different ballgame entirely), enough solvent to keep the sample in solution.

I think you're wasting your time trying to improve NMR. The value of the technique isn't worth it.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#152

Post by darkerside »

hereme888 wrote: post #128

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?

Yeah, that tubing sounds like it could be pretty bad for your health

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#153

Post by waterhouse »

trutannus wrote: post #26
hirundo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option. Regulatory capture.

That and market failure.

The market tends to fail when it's strangled by regulations (which pleases the large incumbents, whose necks are much thicker than their competitors). For any apparent market failure, try translating your complaint into a business plan, and see what obstacles you hit. "These drugs are way too expensive. Why can't I make a profit by making the drug and selling it for a lower price?" Answer: the patent system forbids it.

And for medical conditions that don't yet have drugs developed: "Why can't I make a profit by investing some reasonable amount of money to develop a drug?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development puts the average cost in the billions of dollars. How much of that is due to intrinsic difficulty, and how much is artificially imposed?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#154

Post by kragen »

cloudfifty wrote: post #146
kragen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutist fallacy. The fact that no capitalist market has ever been free of market power doesn't mean that they all function just as badly as Brezhnev-era Soviet "markets" or the US healthcare "market". There are actually existing markets that are more capitalist and less capitalist. Markets mostly organized around government-granted monopolies are by definition failing at capitalism. I think that very li…

> This is an absolutist fallacy. Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage. > I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, prec…

Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are. Actors in all of these sectors, even the noncapitalist ones, engage in lobbying and other forms of anticompetitive behavior, but they generally aren't successful in obtaining monopoly or monopsony power and thus ending capitalism where it exists.

Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications.

I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else.

At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#155

Post by kragen »

notch656a wrote: post #144
kragen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anarchism is leftist.

I consider myself anarchist in the sense I do not believe in the legitimacy of government. I do not have any leftist view whatsoever, but I think people should retain ownership of their property except through consensual trade. Does that mean I'm not an anarchist, or does that mean I'm a leftist?

I suppose it depends on what definitions you're using of words like "government", "leftist view", "their property", and "anarchist"; clearly at least one of them differs from the mainstream definitions. I suspect it's "anarchist", since anarchism (as normally understood) opposes coercive hierarchy more broadly than just the usual definition of "government", including things sometimes described as "property", but I can't know for sure; you might be using a nonstandard definition of "government" instead, for example.

As I said before, though, you might benefit from reading at the introductory section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#156

Post by mrxd »

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…

I said mostly. Some die without medicine, but I'd argue that the number is small in comparison with people who are affected economically. By focusing on deaths, you're effectively minimizing the problem.

It's similar to issues like homelessness: 0.15% of the population are on the street, but the number of people affected by housing costs is much larger.

Or police shootings of unarmed black men: 100-200 per year, which pales in comparison with millions of incarcerated black men.

We hear so much about these tiny problems is because political activists have chosen media-centric strategies to influence policy makers. The idea is to use outrage to get on the news, and then bring up the bigger issues. But in practice, policy makers just solve the outrageous problem: body cams for police; more shelters. Then the media goes away.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#157

Post by tsol »

denton-scratch wrote: post #115

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…

>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?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#158

Post by tehjoker »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #22
tehjoker wrote: post #6

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?

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.

Imagine injecting too much epi! Not good!

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#159

Post by refurb »

notch656a wrote: post #18
dekhn wrote: post #12

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 (typ…

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 insanel…

Terrible argument that implies “nobody makes anything on their own so I have every right to use their work”.

You are free to make your own drugs and “GC/MS some shit”, though you’d just be smarter to buy it outside the US.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#160

Post by refurb »

mayapugai wrote: post #31
notch656a wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 insanel…

Even in academia, where most research originates and matures before being sold to corporations, the vast majority of research is tax-payer funded. I wholeheartedly agree with you stance. It's unsurprising that these regulatory barriers keep all but the wealthiest corporations out of the market considering that big pharma and insurance account for significant share the donor-base of most politicians in the United Stat…

Most of the work is NOT done by academia (i done the academic work myself). I’d say maybe 80% is done by pharma.

You think academia know how to optimize structure? Bulk manufacturer? Organize clinical trials across the globe? Check all the regulatory boxes?

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