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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#161

Post by refurb »

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…

Exactly. This woman in Canada had to sell her house to get a drug that insurance readily pays for in the US. Criminal.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-...

”"It's crazy that I live in Canada, but now I'm looking at having to sell my house for coverage of my medication."

Earlier this week, McLaren walked to her local Shopper's Drug Mart and paid nearly $8,000 for a 21-day supply. On Tuesday she swallowed her first pill, worth $262.40 for just one day of treatment.”

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#162

Post by cloudfifty »

kragen wrote: post #154
cloudfifty wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#163

Post by kragen »

nwiswell wrote: post #40
notch656a wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing with what you're saying, but GC/MS can be bought for like $100 a sample and it's conceivable a system can be invented where private auditors audit the output of an unregulated pharmaceutical manufacturer in such a way that the QC assurances to the consumer are as good or better as in our current system, with much lower regulatory costs.

In the limit what you are describing is a generic drugmaker. It's certainly possible to audit drug quality by sending it to labs, and people do that for darknet drugs all the time, but there are still problems: 1) There is no way to use ex-post analysis alone to achieve the kind of QA that pharmaceutical companies do; they have visibility into the entire manufacturing process and process control. Put another way, a s…

Here's a possible approach.

Buy n = 1024 doses of your insulin or whatever, D(0, i) for i from 0 to n - 1 = 1023, homogenize each dose, and divide each one in half into half-doses called E(0, i) and F(0, i).

Mix pairs F(0, 2*i) and F(0, 2*i + 1) into 512 new doses D(1, i) for i from 0 to 511. Homogenize these new doses and divide each one in half into half-doses called E(1, i) and F(1, i).

Mix pairs F(1, 2*i) and F(1, 2*i + 1) into 256 new doses D(2, i) for i from 0 to 255.

And so on, until in step k = lg n = 10 step you mix the half-doses F(k - 1 = 9, 0) and F(9, 1) into a single dose D(k = 10, 0). Send this D(k, 0) off to the lab to be analyzed.

If the lab is equipped to detect dangerous impurities in your insulin at one-thousandth the danger level, which is reasonable for many contaminants, and the sample comes back clean, then you know that all 1024 doses were safe, though some of them may have the wrong dose. Mix the remaining 1023 doses well so that they all have the same dose and store them safely.

If not, you need to track down the contamination (or massive dilution), so in the next iteration, you send E(9, 0) and E(9, 1) to the lab for analysis. If one of them comes back safe, you know the 511 doses that were mixed into it were okay, and you can mix them well and store them safely, then repeat the process on the contaminated subtree.

Depending on your cost function (latency, shipping and handling costs, etc.) and your priors for correlation among the samples, it might be worthwhile to recurse more deeply on failure: instead of sending E(9, i) for i from 0 to 1 to the lab, you might instead send them E(6, i) for i from 0 to 15. If one out of 30 doses was randomly contaminated, for example, about 14 out of the 16 groups will be bad on average, while if it's one out of 100, then you'll have about 7 bad groups out of 16. At some point you need to give up on the recursion, too, or you'll end up testing almost all 1024 doses when they're all bad.

This of course doesn't solve the problem of future buys, just reduces it by the factor of n.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#164

Post by waterhouse »

kragen wrote: post #129
waterhouse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are a big part of how the stifling is done. Getting rid of them, or at least cutting their term by a factor of 3-4, would help a great deal.

While I agree that patents are net harmful, especially in software, if you cut their term by a factor of 4 to 5 years, many of them would expire before being granted, which would be a hard policy to defend.

Heh, interesting. Perhaps that problem would self-correct after a while; if the payoff for a patent was lower, fewer would apply and there would be less of a backlog... Hmm, looking into it, https://www.uspto.gov/dashboard/patents/pendency.html measures a bunch of different things, but it seems "traditional total pendency" is the main metric, and it seems to be about 2 years on that at the moment. Of course, if there's high variance, then that could mean that a bunch do take 5 years.

That said, if a patent is pending and no one knows when it'll be granted, is that not enough? Would competitors really introduce their own patent-violating version, knowing they may have to suddenly cut production if the patent goes through? Do they do that today?

At any rate, those delays seem absurd; presumably they're due to having a backlog, due to the USPTO not employing enough people, due presumably to them not having enough of a budget. Not that I'm in favor of giving money to patent-granters, though. I wonder if a fee paid by the patent-holders—say, a small percentage of the revenue from selling patented products—would be a reasonable way to fund it.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#166

Post by R0b0t1 »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #112
nynx wrote: post #14

I hope we can eventually have self-contained machines that can synthesize many different types of medications. By certifying the machines or testing them thoroughly, you can lessen the worry that people will synthesize the drugs wrong. I think this is almost possible for a large range of simple, small-molecule drugs.

That could never be as efficient or as safe as making huge industrial-size batches.

Citation needed. You often get far better purity with lab scale synthesis, but the cost per mole is OOM higher.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#167

Post by notch656a »

kragen wrote: post #155
notch656a wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

I've looked it over. I understand leftists have a rich history of invoking anti-state ideology. I'm using the oxford definition of anarchism.

I'm not saying leftists can't exist in anarchism as some sort of pact or contract amongst leftist, in the sense of without coercive hierarchy. But I don't see how anarchism is inherently leftist. If leftism means socialism or some form of redistributing property involuntarily, that sounds coercive.

Voluntary exchange of property and capital is the opposite of coercion. It seems capitalism fits in neatly with anarchism.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#168

Post by kragen »

waterhouse wrote: post #164
kragen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that patents are net harmful, especially in software, if you cut their term by a factor of 4 to 5 years, many of them would expire before being granted, which would be a hard policy to defend.

Heh, interesting. Perhaps that problem would self-correct after a while; if the payoff for a patent was lower, fewer would apply and there would be less of a backlog... Hmm, looking into it, https://www.uspto.gov/dashboard/patents/pendency.html measures a bunch of different things, but it seems "traditional total pendency" is the main metric, and it seems to be about 2 years on that at the moment. Of course, if there…

Competitors might have a bigger incentive to try to delay the granting of the patent with red tape.

I don't know how common it is today to introduce a product while planning to cancel it if a competitor's pending patent gets granted.

The funding of the PTO has been a contentious political issue for decades.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#169

Post by notch656a »

refurb wrote: post #159
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…

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.

My argument is terrible. That's why yours is found at the bottom, and mine at the top.

Fuck the thieving snakes claiming it is "their" work when an entirely different 3rd party with no prior contract with the pharma snakes uses their own reagents and chemicals and published or reverse engineered synthetic pathway to produce a substance.

"You are free to make your own drugs." I suppose you are, if you're willing to violate the CSA and FDA/DEA regulations, as my comment pertained to being able to buy drugs _someone else_ made in their basement (although I'd also like to include making your own as well).

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#170

Post by refurb »

notch656a wrote: post #169
refurb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My argument is terrible. That's why yours is found at the bottom, and mine at the top. Fuck the thieving snakes claiming it is "their" work when an entirely different 3rd party with no prior contract with the pharma snakes uses their own reagents and chemicals and published or reverse engineered synthetic pathway to produce a substance. "You are free to make your own drugs." I suppose you are, if you're willing to vi…

Our comments are found in the same place because mine is a reply to yours?

You sounds like a very angry anarchist who doesn't really understand R&D works and what kind of effort is required to put into it.

Why would making your own medicines violate the CSA or DEA regulations? You just looking to get high?

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