Anarchists making their own medicine (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#171

Post by notch656a » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:03 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #170

notch656a wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Maybe you are unaware. Many medicines are controlled substances. Some people are ill and not just looking to get high, although I think getting high is OK too.

>You sounds like a very angry anarchist

Shit, I am an anarchist. I guess you impugned my character and my statements must be irrelevant. Oh wait, that is ad hominem fallacy.

>who doesn't really understand R&D works and what kind of effort is required to put into it.

I am not angry about R&D. R&D I find to be one of the legitimate components of pharma. It takes so many people to bring a drug to market, I don't think you can really understand the complete picture of how R&D works either. But thank you for the arrogant superiority complex. Are you in R&D or something or why do you think I'm attacking researchers? I've continually said (and perhaps this was better reflected on other comments, apologies if not clear enough on my prior) researchers are important to drug development and that they create real value.

It's the regulatory capture, lobbying, insanely high regulatory barriers that enable many pharma businesses to squash new development from competitors that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, corrupt intermingling with FDA and agencies. Amongst other things, but those are some of the larger ones.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#172

Post by snakeboy » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:29 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #35

snakeboy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life. I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.

>Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is. Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned o…

> Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

Huh? You assume the vaccines cause heart issues, and use as evidence for concluding that vaccines cause heart issues...? Did I misunderstand?

I don't really have an opinion here since I haven't looked at any of the data you're referencing.

Moreover, this is straying from my initial point, which was that opioid addiction is life-destroying on an scale far beyond what we have yet seen from vaccines, and it doesn't even require any careful study to see that since the effect size is so huge, with explicit societal harm in the form of drug trafficking, crime, and overdose deaths.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#173

Post by gpshead » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #113

jjoonathan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.

At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemi…

Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#174

Post by jbirer » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:54 AM UTC

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?

Not to mention that PrEP is not made to be injected, blood clots and other issues can appear. These natural medicine people are dangerous.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#175

Post by bmer » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:13 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #160

mayapugai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Yes? That is literally where the standards for these things are developed, and constantly tested? For example: the techniques for optimizing structure? Developed in academia. Bulk manufacturing? Reliant on tons of science, engineering, and mathematics, that was developed in academia.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#176

Post by waterhouse » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:45 AM UTC

jbirer wrote: post #174

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?

Not to mention that PrEP is not made to be injected, blood clots and other issues can appear. These natural medicine people are dangerous.

Your information may be out of date. Wiki[1] says "In December 2021, the FDA approved Apretude, which is an injectable form of PrEP", and Apretude seems to be a brand name for cabotegravir, which is the chemical named in the OP. (The capital letters in PrEP make me think it's a specific drug, but apparently people use it to mean several different drugs with similar purposes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-exposure_prophylaxis

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#177

Post by waterhouse » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:47 AM UTC

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?

And how does the risk of that compare against:

  - the risks from whatever else the heroin is cut with (fentanyl?)
  - the risk of getting HIV
  - the risks of taking heroin in the first place

I suspect that what they're doing is a net improvement.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#178

Post by beaconstudios » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:53 AM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #148

kragen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you would benefit from reading at least the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism .

Oxford dictionary: noun belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion. That sounds compatible with mere free trade amongst men without any sort of socialism. Seems like leftism wants some involuntary reallocation of capital, but maybe I'm mistaken. If they don't I'd say they're just charitable capitalists.

Anarchism isn't just "no rules or government" as it means in common parlance; it is against coercive hierarchy in general, and capitalism is inherently coercive because it involves denial of access to means of production, and denial of access to necessary resources like food and medicine. Think of anarchism as being more akin to a modern attempt at the tribal system of humanity's prehistory, but scaled up: resources being pooled and shared instead of traded transactionally. There are other interpretations of anarchist productive organisation but that's a common one.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#179

Post by kragen » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 8:08 AM UTC

gpshead wrote: post #173

kragen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemi…

Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

You may have a point there, but I think it would be a stronger point if you were advocating prohibiting something like rock climbing or motorcycle riding during the pandemic, because the absolute risk that a young, healthy person will end up in the hospital due to covid is just so much lower than those activities. It's a quick slippery slope to prohibiting physical inactivity that could produce obesity.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#180

Post by camillomiller » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 8:15 AM UTC

tastyfreeze wrote: post #74

camillomiller wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to frame all this a bit better: in Italy epipens cost… wait for it… ZERO - nil - nada. You have a diagnose of anaphylactic shock risk? You get epipens. Public healthcare pays for it, therefore everyone pays for it with their taxes. Without a prescription, you can get one for around 75€, which is already considered criminally expensive. This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&…

I'm confused. Isn't this like saying I bought you lunch with money I took from you last year so your lunch was free?

No. Spreading the costs over millions of taxpayers makes the cost you pay into the system way smaller, plus gives the government a huge contractual power when dealing with pharma companies. It’s really not that hard to comprehend, but I yet have to find a single American that for some reason doesn’t try to justify or straight up defend the US broken and unequal healthcare system.