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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#81

Post by beaconstudios »

kragen wrote: post #54
mrxd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

92% of contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by companies: https://www.suse.com/suse-defines/definition/linux-contribut... Most major OSS projects are controlled by a few companies who pay developers to work on them. They're more like industry consortiums than DIY anarchist collectives.

Something can be both an industry consortium and a DIY anarchist collective, like Linux; the Linux Foundation isn't Linux. It turns out that industrial companies don't appreciate being subject to monopoly rents any more than private individuals do! The GPL is undeniably very anarchist, and it serves as a kind of constitution that keeps the companies that participate in GPL projects from controlling them. Consider, fo…

It's misleading to mix up anarchism and marxism-leninism. While both are anti capitalist, ML is the one where you're just replacing one hierarchy (economic power) with another (party membership). Anarchism is fundamentally against coercive hierarchy.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#82

Post by fabian2k »

kragen wrote: post #75
dekhn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines? Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin. I'm typing…

You can't really escape the physics here, you need a very strong and very homogeneous magnetic field for NMR and very sensitive electronics to detect the signal. That's not something we can do for cheap right now.

And even beyond that I don't think the area has enough volumen and is competitive enough to produce significantly lower prices. The high-field NMR area is almost a monopoly right now, the benchtops and lower field instruments are somewhat competitive. But even those are in price areas far beyond someone doing synthesis at home.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#83

Post by kragen »

fabian2k wrote: post #71
kragen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Benchtops are at 60-90 MHz field strengths. That is not really enough to look at more complex molecules, the bigger routine NMR spectrometers are at 400-600 MHz (and there are even larger ones, but those are not used for small molecules that much). And even then those benchtops cost something close to 100k USD, that's quite far from affordable. The "room temperature" superconductors are not used at room temperature i…

Thank you for explaining!

Yes, I don't know if the current room-temperature superconductor material (which really is room temperature, 15°C) will ever be useful for this; it was only discovered in 02020, so it is very unlikely that anyone is using it in a product today, even if they find a way to apply the necessary pressure (267 GPa, thus requiring ultrahard anvils). You're probably thinking of something like YBCO, which is "high-temperature" in the sense you're describing, requiring only LN₂, not "room-temperature".

Costs change over time. There was a time when solar panels cost 100k USD, too. A lot of the costs you're describing are NRE; others are costs that can be reduced.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#84

Post by pessimizer »

petermcneeley wrote: post #5

Not an Anachist but I wonder how much of the danger here is due to the law. Ideally they would simply be selling the epipencils and doing testing etc but there is no way they would be able to do this. So instead the best they can do is create DIY kits. I wonder how far they can legally push the DIY kit. Can they ship you supplies with the kit? Can they ship you expresso-like packs for your DIY machine?

They should just call them nutritional supplements so they'll be completely unregulated for either efficacy or safety.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#85

Post by salmonfamine »

Tenoke wrote: post #76
chillingeffect wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I call Metacapitalism.

Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.

Only the most naive understanding of capitalism holds those two things as opposites, or mutually exclusive.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#86

Post by kragen »

hammock wrote: post #70
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.

The -mabs are often denied because they really are expensive to make. Ivermectin is super cheap and quite safe in the usual doses; in the case of covid, denying it to people isn't directly causing any harm, but also very little good, if any.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#87

Post by dekhn »

kragen wrote: post #75
dekhn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines? Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin. I'm typing…

Some things change, but to make NMR cost effective would be cheating mother nature. The entire technique is based on producing a strong and homogenous magnetic field that can hold a lot of sample, only to probe the sample with weak RF and listen to its faint echoes.

Industrial diamonds got "cheap" but large ones never did.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#88

Post by fallingknife »

I love this. I have a disorder with no cure, so I will take medication daily for the rest of my life. Worse, it's a controlled substance, so there are all sorts of obstacles thrown in my way arbitrarily. I have to get a new prescription written by my doctor every 3 months, which is a pain in the ass as I have to deal with the bureaucracy. Every time I change jobs, new insurance requires "prior authorization" in addition to a new prescription, so more BS. If I'm traveling abroad, the pharmacy can't ship overseas, and if I get a prescription there, the insurance company won't cover it (and it's more than $1000 / month). Doctors office running a few days behind or not answering faxes (lol) from the pharmacy when I need a new script (happens most of the time I need one)? SOL. Fuck this whole system. I am sick of having to ask permission to get the medicine I need.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#89

Post by taylorportman »

kragen wrote: post #42
nwiswell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Clearly making it happen will require a revolution in manufacturing, which may or may not already be underway, but making it happen for software required decades of continuous revolution in semiconductors and telecommunications. Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid ch…

Probably the 'manufacturing revolution' will be modifying yeast, plants, etc. to produce the chemical compound of interest. Everyone needn't have expensive equipment - testing can be outsourced. Such an effort would need a GPL like agreement to keep people honest, but the technology exists.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#90

Post by lend000 »

dgb23 wrote: post #73
trutannus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and market failure.

I'm not sure if life saving medicine should or even can be understood through economic equilibrium. This is ultimately a question of ethics, politics and sheer survival. This isn't a market in the first place and it doesn't help that we pretend it is.

Everything is a market. Someone has to produce a finite supply for some cost. There is some demand for the medicine. Suppliers can be incentivized to produce by demand through price.

Look up the percentage of all drugs that were invented in the United States. Socialized medicine is subsidized by capitalist innovation overseas. There are so many problems with the US system, but they have more to do with regulatory capture (including difficulty of FDA approval + difficulty of becoming a doctor) and price transparency than anything else.

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