- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Sharing because I found this very interesting.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.
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I fucking love pirate medicine. Fuck the US healthcare system, what good is having the “best healthcare in the world” if you can’t even afford mediocre healthcare?
If it was the best healthcare in the world, we’d have the best outcomes and we don’t even have that for rich people. We have a (non-metric) shit ton of world class research universities and highly respected agencies like the FDA and NIH but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs.
I’d obviously rather go to an American hospital than a hospital in most of the world but spending a lot to cover up a shitty system isn’t as good as a functioning system.
Edit: I originally had NHS instead of NIH but the NHS, is, obviously, where British people get their brain medicines.
but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs
Lmfao
I’d rather get healthcare at all. I’ve been too poor to afford any medical care at points in my life, I’d settle for even some low quality care as opposed to none at all and hoping that this new weird pain either is insignificant and goes away without issue, or it gently takes me out in the night.
I’m excited to see where pirate medicine goes. I’ve met a trans woman who told me that her DIY HRT was life changing in the best possible way, and I can only dream of what would happen if people started making their own Insulin or T or whatever
The NHS is British, not american
Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.
Piracy is how you got Netflix.
This is how we’ll change the pharmaceutical industry. They’ll overreact and Streisand Effect this and it’ll blow up. Become normalized. The open source tech will improve.
This is a good thing. Period.
Pirating movies and games can’t kill you
Home brewing seizure medication can
This is America dude. Human life costs $7.25 an hour here. We can’t even do anything to keep children safe from their number 1 killer here.
Nobody cares. Those who do care are completely powerless to change anything.
Yes. Mistakes will happen. People will die. People die every day right now. Many of them because they can’t afford life saving medicine. I’d happily take a risk on this before I’d saddle my family with $50,000 a month for medicine that you can get in Canada or Mexico for $50.
We can’t even do anything to keep children safe from their number 1 killer here.
By this the parent commenter means “car crashes,” by the way. Car dependent zoning is literally mass-murdering more children than school shooters ever did and we’re doing almost nothing to fix it.
I personally think open source software and hardware is a good starting point to making DIY stuff legal in the future.
The all new sudafeb…like Sudafed but with a D at the end because they’re chemically the same just with a D at the end.
I wish there was some kind of open source collective organization under which you could release anything with eternal open source license that’d be free forever. It could be anything from software, tech or medicine like penicillin so that megacorps could not benefit from it in any way.
The Open Source Initiative has a giant list of licenses that anyone can use to make their works fully open-source.
Some are just for code, but I’m sure they could be adapted to things like medicine, if needed.
This is extremely dangerous and also something I feel must be considered a natural and obvious extension of a right I believe to be fundamental: bodily autonomy.
Would I do this? Probably not, maybe for some medicines, that are easily made administrable from bulk chemicals but likely not. But behind all rights stands bodily autonomy. It is your flesh and not mine. If we don’t want people doing this themselves the lever we should use is easing access to expert made medicines. Desperate people do stupid things.
Also this is cyberpunk as hell and aesthetically I’m so here for it
Compounding pharmacies should not be subjected to patents. Then the costs are all local instead of tithes to the corporate clergy.
This is extremely dangerous and also something I feel must be considered a natural and obvious extension of a right I believe to be fundamental: bodily autonomy.
There is a significant distinction between the right to bodily autonomy and the right to distribute quack medicine. And that’s sort of the rub. As soon as you start marketing your product to third parties under false pretexts, we’re not longer talking about an individual’s right to self. And we get into an even more tangled web when we start talking about health care for children or the elderly, who lack the mental acuity to make informed choices.
Also this is cyberpunk as hell and aesthetically I’m so here for it
Everyone wants to get the military grade Sandevistan drive. Nobody thinks they’re going to succumb to cyberpsychosis.
I think an off the shelf microlab that can reliably synthesize a particular medicine is something that’s commercially viable, which is probably a safe middle ground here and sort of what they’re proof of concepting.
Rather than putting together a DIY lab like this, a pre-made kit that makes one medication would easily make a ton of meds available. Not just here but all around the world.
I would say the next step would probably be to create a certification process for microlabs categorizing their safety and effectiveness
There was a serious fight against this in the COVID years, saying it was fighting anti-science that was recommending fake medicine to people. How can this model possibly subvert what happened in those years?
I agree with the idea of bodily autonomy. Above all, someone should have the right to do, or not do, whatever they want with their own person.
Whether that is to listen to doctors advice, buy pharmaceuticals and self-administer as prescribed, or even end your own life, and everything in between.
Quick disclaimer, suicide should still be evaluated by a psychiatric professional, and simply being suicidal shouldn’t necessarily mean that nobody can, or should stop you from committing that act. I’m mostly referring to medically assisted self termination, after the appropriate safeguards, checks, and balances have been cleared. Simply wanting to off yourself without being cleared as having sound mind should be something we, as a society, should address carefully, with the assistance of mental health professionals.
With all that being said: I probably would DIY some pharmaceuticals. Anything that’s an opiate or other restricted substance, definitely not. But if I can buy the ingredients without needing a special permit or license, I definitely would.
The New Text Document makes this.
…well, this is a good way to shine the spotlight on a massive problem. I’d be pretty hesitant to take DIY meds unless it was life-critical and my only option (which… lots of don’t have that option, and just die after hitting the health paygate…). The value here is its potential to slap some sense into the US and get our broken-as-fuck healthcare system caught up with the rest of the world so people don’t need moonshine insulin or w/e in the first place.
That this conversation is even taking place is testament to how horrible our current system is.
What’s broken is largely insurance setting prices.
I don’t see this fixing it.
My first thought when I saw the headline was “Can it help me pull this tooth without it hurting so badly?”
Honestly… is there a practical reason why something like lidocaine isn’t available to the average consumer?
It is, eg lidocaine patches. It has to be injected to really do much. Not aware of any injectables that are over the counter.
I have no idea. I’ve got some lidocaine viscous they gave me for the pain. I’m lucky enough to have medical, just not dental. But from experience, it helps temporarily numb the surface pain, but if it’s in the root, or if you’re pulling the tooth, it does not help.
Clove oil. Put a few drops on a cotton ball and put it against the tooth. Your whole mouth will go pretty numb but it will usually kill the pain for a while.
American healthcare sucks.
I’ve had relief for gum/tooth pain by just holding a whole clove on the affected area.
it is, but you need to have some chemistry knowledge to be able to extract it from things like anal lube, and that’s where I think this DIY project will shine
This is super cool and helpful as a resource but I really don’t think people without a chemistry background should be doing anything more than following precise instructions, hopefully with some form of verification test at the end. The idea to have people without a chemistry background use a forked version of askcos and just run with it is a little scary.
The affordable Controlled Lab Reactor for diy is fantastic for helping people follow precise instructions to the letter just all of those instructions should be meticulously vetted by actual chemists and have some safeguard tests at the end where necessary. It seems the founder wants that vision too at the end of the conference just there’s not enough of a community yet to support it.
Yeah… This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren’t just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.
Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.
This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don’t really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren’t equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.
Might be safer for HRT, than having to trust a 3rd party to buy it from if you live in a place that can’t get it thru insurance or Dr.
I see drug lords getting into this if it is feasible and it isn’t a good scenario. It would paint them as real saviors and make the situation more unstable.
Technically, drug dealers are using the tech (more specifically, other people are using it, then selling the product to the drug dealers, who then sell it to their customers as a ‘service’ included with the drugs)
The thing is, they’re not doing it to make stronger drugs, or for PR purposes. They’re actually adding pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEPs) into their heroin, which then creates the side effect of preventing the contraction of HIV from the needles. (referenced about 1/3rd of the way down this article)
If people are already going to be addicted to these drugs, them not getting HIV from it is just one harm reduction measure that can reduce their risk of serious, permanent illness.
I don’t know about where you live, but here the drug lords owns some territory. And within that territory, they take political actions like closing the nearby churches, for example. I think selling actual medication could serve their purpose very well. They already sell smartphones for a low price to the local people ($15).
I believe every American knows someone whose life is made substantially worse because of a lack of access to healthcare.
I want to set this up and learn to use it. I want to keep it and maintain it and wait. Because I’ll inevitably hear from someone that they can’t afford their life-saving medication.
Oh, also I have an exceedingly rare hereditary disease, so it feels like a certainty I’ll need it for myself someday.
I know someone whose life is made substantially worse because they have a lack of access to healthcare. They live in Europe and can’t get access to the specialized medicine that they need in the timeframe that they need it in. I’m not saying that socialized medicine is bad—I’m actually all for it—but it needs to be implemented well for it to actually work. This is just my anecdotal evidence to say that just because everyone has access doesn’t automatically mean it’s adequate access.
I can’t really comment on the European experience though, so I said American, which I am, and which I am qualified to talk about.
I’m not European either. I’m also American. I wasn’t contradicting anything you were saying; I agree with it. I was just trying to add to the discussion by suggesting that if we are going to get universal healthcare right in America, we have to consider a lot more than just free access.
Four Thieves are legit. Controversial but they’re confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed .
As is typical of Piracy.
Haha that name is fantastic! It’s a riff on the best selling vinegar that you get at Costco and similar places called “Four Monks” vinegar.
Actually it’s the name for a mix of vinegar, garlic, and herbs that was a home remedy to help prevent the plague.
Oh interesting, I guess I had the name attribution backwards!
You wouldn’t download a
carlife saving medicine!Hail Four Thieves Vinegar Collective!
More DIY, right to repair, open source living.
When a person has nothing left to lose they will take chances that otherwise they wouldn’t. If we weren’t living in a corporatocracy, perhaps there’d be no demand for this sort of thing, but we do and there is.
Idk. Medicine is one of those skills where I prefer someone that has studied for 7 years vs me who watches a 15 min how to video and read webmd
Well that’s the coolest part about this, everything is based on the existing research.
The drugs they’re making are the exact same chemical compounds formulated by the drug companies, and contrary to popular belief, the compounds can actually be relatively simple, it’s the process of finding which compound that takes the most money from R&D.
So if you have 2-3 very standard chemicals, with well known reactions and outcomes, and you have the exact blueprint of what the final result should look like, and you can chemically test it afterward to see if it combined as expected, then anyone who has enough reason to use this instead of traditional means (i.e. being priced out of lifesaving medication completely) can be reasonably confident it will work.
Obviously the people who would benefit most from this technology would prefer a doctor and pharmacy to be involved as well. The point is that personal preference doesn’t really mean much when the preferred option is inaccessible and the alternative is death or a dramatically reduced quality of life. You do the best with what you have.
Hope John Green is aware of this. He’s fighting tuberculosis globally!
While this is definitely an interesting proposition, for most people in the US wouldn’t something like Mark Cuban’s CostPlus drugs website be a more reasonable solution?
They could do that, but the drugs are still much too expensive comparatively, and it doesn’t include many drugs, especially the ones that are the most absurdly priced.
For instance, after looking through various articles on him and scraping together some of the data, out of the medications referenced as being some that he’s made:
Misoprostol (Abortion Medication) - $14.90 on CPG - $0.89 via MicroLab
Sovaldi (Cures Hepatitis C) - Not available on CPG (normally $84,000) - $70 via MicroLab
Kalydeco (Treats Cystic Fibrosis) - Not available on CPG (Normally ~$500/day) - $10/day via MicroLab
Daraprim (Treats Parasitic Diseases & Some AIDS Patients) - $2443/30 pills on CPG - $80/30 Pills via MicroLab
Epinephrine (Treats Allergic Reactions, AKA epipen) - Not available on CPG (Normally $650-$750) - Initially $30 via MicroLab ($3/reload after)
The pharmaceutical industry is so screwed up, and these prices only show it more clearly.
They don’t have everything and especially rare mega expensive stuff that’s not widely generic options
