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An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

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Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#181

Post by pizza »

Sangermaine wrote: post #59
leggomylibro wrote: post #2

That 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…

>but if you're offered medicine with 95% efficacy that you can afford But it's not clear at all this is the case here. The article itself notes that it's unknown whether anyone has ever used any of these DIY medicines/medical devices, let alone how well they actually work. For all we know he could be pushing complete nonsense that kills people.

He could be, but.. it's not as if all federally-sanctioned medicines are not complete nonsense that (don't) kill people, either. Let alone merely having greater iatrogenics than benefits. Relatedly, when doctors strike, mortality rates decrease [0]. Plus, very useful medicines that are deemed too unsafe to become publicly consumed may be totally safe for subsets of the general population, e.g. based on differing expression of enzymes, or other phenotypic differences.

If you are (more or less) coping just fine with a health problem, (most often) you shouldn't really take any medicine whatsoever, regardless of whether or not it is approved.

Only if you are distressed and desperate can you (a priori) expect medicine to do more good than harm. And if you are in that category, and the medicines that exist officially did not help, then you must make other attempts to rectify the problem in order to avoid danger.

Admittedly it's not much of a source of relief, but the good thing about the nature of hobbyist tinkering networks is that information about dangers spreads fast, as well as information about discovered panaceas (both when the results are replicated in their favor, and when they falsify the panacea).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#183

Post by jaggederest »

jmiserez wrote: post #174
jaggederest wrote: post #34

For people who are interested, it's referenced in the article, but NurdRage did a synthesis of Pyrimethamine "from scratch". Only took 2 years and ~$22k, but of course, replicating his synthesis would be a little bit easier... for another PhD Chemist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddCuWX4vtOA&list=PLU79801KtV...

Not only “from scratch”, he even did it from widely available household products. I think he said in the last video that it would have been cheaper and faster if he had bought some of the precursor chemicals directly instead of having to make them first.

Well, from my limited 100-level-chemistry-plus-youtube education, he could have just bought the immediate precursors directly for pyrimethamine itself, i.e. possibly even 2-(p-chlorophenyl)-3-oxopentanenitrile, guanadinium chloride, and Trimethyl Orthoformate, which would make it a 3-step synthesis instead of a 17-step synthesis, so yeah, pretty easy. At the very least he could cut out ~2/3rds of those steps for a 7-step or 6-step synthesis.

So cheaper by easily an order of magnitude, possibly ~$100 a batch or less. Of course, if you want FDA grade instead of technical grade your prices for everything skyrocket and your workup has to improve a bunch.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#184

Post by 131012 »

evanwise wrote: post #165
tormeh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Argubly regulation is the problem we're in this mess. Do you think an epipen would cost $600 if there weren't a Government granted monopoly? All property is government intervention. And property is good. Because property is capitalism, and capitalism is God's will. /s

I sometimes feel like "free-market" types are actually incapable of understanding this point. The idea that markets and property exist as some sort of independent, empirical objects is baked so deeply into their ideology that it's almost as if they lack the symbolic vocabulary to even conceptualize the idea that property itself is created by regulations.

Or swords and chainmails if we go back to the birth of common law and guns and bacterial warfare in the case of Turtle Island aka Americas.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#185

Post by [deleted] »

computator wrote: post #147

Interesting assertion from the FAQ on Michael Laufer's website[1]: > Q: What about quality control? A: It’s important to know that making small quantities of a chemical is vastly different than making it on an industrial scale. The chemistry isn’t even the same. This is a big reason why chemical engineering is an entire field of study. With smaller reactions, while you do have to be more precise in your measurements…

[deleted]

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#186

Post by wfo »

alasdair_ wrote: post #146
wfo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the natural disaster is free market capitalism Government-protected monopolies (i.e. drug patents) are almost the antithesis of free-market capitalism.

No they are the very definition of free-market capitalism. They are property, and property rights are the entire basis of capitalism. In particular, private ownership over the means of production (which is the definition of capitalism) requires the government grant monopolies to these owners.

Every property right is a government-protected monopoly; without these government monopolies what you have is an end to private property which may be desirable but is certainly not free-market capitalism, it is communism.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#187

Post by r00fus »

SilasX wrote: post #145
r00fus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these outcomes you describe actually bad? While I believe in the rule of law, the fact is that law has been bent to serve the wealthy and powerful. Perhaps such lawbreaking is simply the symptom of the disease as Dr. Prasad says, which is (patent laws that allow current) drug pricing.

I was only speaking to rayiner's a) attempt to break the analogy between physical theft and piracy, and b) insistence that teaching DIY production of patented drugs "doesn't offend" the monopoly. But yes, I strongly believe that it's a very bad economic model that insists that drugs -- or any physical good for that matter -- should (in any sense of "should") be sold at marginal production cost.

I disagree. Not sure how you got from my position to yours.

The patent system is broken. IP laws are far too powerful and some things should really be sold at marginal production cost + a small markup for distribution.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#188

Post by wfo »

pxeboot wrote: post #118
wfo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except that our current health care system isn't anywhere close to free market capitalism.

It is the closest healthcare system in the developed world to free market capitalism since every other country has socialized medicine; a system much more free-market than ours would create an untenable hellscape for the vast majority of the population that would be voted into oblivion or cause massive riots and death. We sit at the most extreme free-market end of possible healthcare systems that could feasibly exist in reality.

Imagine a true free market healthcare system. Or just one step further than ours: no medicare. Imagine if every middle-aged middle or lower class American had to, as their parents age and require more healthcare than anyone can feasibly afford, choose: bankruptcy and permanent insurmountable debt, or watch your parents die knowing you chose not to stop it. What glorious freedom.

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#189

Post by SilasX »

r00fus wrote: post #187
SilasX wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was only speaking to rayiner's a) attempt to break the analogy between physical theft and piracy, and b) insistence that teaching DIY production of patented drugs "doesn't offend" the monopoly. But yes, I strongly believe that it's a very bad economic model that insists that drugs -- or any physical good for that matter -- should (in any sense of "should") be sold at marginal production cost.

I disagree. Not sure how you got from my position to yours. The patent system is broken. IP laws are far too powerful and some things should really be sold at marginal production cost + a small markup for distribution.

No markup for cost of capital e.g. factory equipment to manufacture something?

Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds

#190

Post by phkahler »

What if he instead made a more reliable setup and recipe? Then someone could make a lab and rent it out to people wanting to make their own stuff. It would still be DIY but it would be in a more controlled environment. This model does involve some risk to the lab, but hey have the renter agree to binding arbitration or something.
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