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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#61

Post by notch656a »

LiquidSky wrote: post #41
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.

>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. No, it's not. This is ideological libertarian nonsense. There's a reason pharma came to be regulated in the first place. All this will lead to are more inju…

>No, it's not. This is ideological libertarian nonsense.

If I could flag your post, I would. This is purely political nonsense and a god-like attempt to disprove something through fiat.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#62

Post by chillingeffect »

kragen wrote: post #58
pessimizer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's also worth mentioning that albuterol and similar inhalers used to be an exception to the prohibitions on CFCs (these inhalers an't used in large enough volume to do significant ozone damage), but due to lobbying from the companies that made them, they no longer are. Why would a company lobby to outlaw its current product? Well, they had patents on "improved" CFC-free versions, allowing them to exclude new entran…

That's what I call Metacapitalism.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#63

Post by dekhn »

kragen wrote: post #56
dekhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miniaturized NMR? can you explain how that would work?

Benchtop NMR spectrometers already exist (for decades now), and some are already cryogen-free, permitting room-temperature measurements, eliminating the dewar and cryogens which account for a lot of the mass and volume of traditional NMR spectrometers. We now have room-temperature superconductors, which might work to eliminate the bulky, heavy permanent magnets in current benchtop devices, though the pressures requir…

benchtop NMR doesn't solve this problem, it's not powerful enough.

If you had improvements to NMR they would actually go first to other things than doing chemical analysis of anarchist drug batches. IE there are other industries that will buy all your machines if they existed.

The real question is why would you EVER use NMR for just about anything? It's really high cost and the total value of the data is lower than just about any other technique. It really only makes sense in research situations.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#64

Post by rootusrootus »

nwiswell wrote: post #34
kragen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the DIY medicines weren't of dubious quality? What if they were higher quality than the ones that cost US$750 a dose? What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them, and the DIY stuff turned out to be purer and more precisely dosed? That's what happened with Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows, and it's what's happening now with…

> What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them I can fairly confidently predict this will not happen like it did for software. Chemical analysis has been around a long time and remains difficult for experts to do accurately without context, let alone for a layman. Gas chromatography, for example, requires large and expensive machinery and some ide…

Heck, even the FDA can't guarantee all generics are equivalent to the branded version (some anticonvulsants come to mind). Might be a while before this ability comes to the masses.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#65

Post by dekhn »

philipkglass wrote: post #59
dekhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miniaturized NMR? can you explain how that would work?

They use rare earth permanent magnets and don't offer the resolution of superconducting magnet NMR, but they are much smaller and cheaper (tens of thousands of dollars, new) than superconducting units or the even older resistive electromagnet NMR units. The first one I saw was from picoSpin, which has since been acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific. I think that there are multiple vendors now. Here's a current picoSp…

An 80MHz desktop NMR in 2022 is hilarious. This owuld be great to put in a research lab or to teach students, but it's not something that could be used in a high volume, high quality pharma testing situation.

(my phd in nmr is from 20 years ago... even then it was hard to justify the expense of nmr machines in structural biology...)

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#66

Post by kragen »

jjoonathan wrote: post #28
trhway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who real…

Pro-opiate and anti-vax? Niiiice!

I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#67

Post by camillomiller »

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…

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&d and other costs justify the US prices for the same drugs that are sold profitably Yet way cheaper in other western markets.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#68

Post by jjoonathan »

kragen wrote: post #66
jjoonathan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-opiate and anti-vax? Niiiice!

I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".

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.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#69

Post by notch656a »

nwiswell wrote: post #55
notch656a wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are seeing the same thing, a system designed to remove corruption/regulatory capture/lobbying as far as possible from the process. I'm seeing a "rogue" auditor that performs the same service, while you are seeing a rogue government. If the outcome is the same, I am fine with either. Your pointed weakness regarding auditing the manufacturing process could be incorporated into either.

> I think we are seeing the same thing, a system designed to remove corruption/regulatory capture/lobbying as far as possible from the process Not really. It's more like a system to selectively remove intellectual property rights without destroying the financial incentive to develop drugs.

Oh. So you don't want a system that removes corruption, regulatory capture, and lobbying as far as possible? I don't want to destroy the financial incentive either, I think it's great people that bring wanted goods to market profit from it.

IP is an interesting point, although I'm not convinced that generating the IP is more than a small fraction of the cost of a drug. An aggregate I saw from 2011-2018 puts Research at only 17% of revenue, and only some proportion of that is geared towards generating IP. That is to say, with all else removed you could generate an IP only company for 17% the cost of drug sales.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#70

Post by hammock »

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…

Affordability is not the only reason people are being denied medicine. Many people have wanted, e.g. ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, etc; and even gone to court to fight to get them, not because of the cost but because doctors, pharmacies and/or government bodies refuse to provide.
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