The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine (404media.co) 295
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: I've been videochatting with Mixael Swan Laufer for about 30 minutes about an exciting discovery when he points out that to date, the best way he's been able to bring attention to his organization is "the old school method of me performing a bunch of federal felonies on stage in front of a bunch of people." I stop him and ask: "In this case, what are the felonies?" "Well, the list is pretty long," he said. Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do "right to repair for your body." Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves' had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it. [...]
Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn't shilling random supplements, and doesn't have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves. "We don't invent anything, really," Laufer said. "We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like 'This works, but you can't get it.' Well, here's a way to get it." A slide at his talk reads "Isn't this illegal? Yeah. Grow up." Four Thieves has developed a suite of open-source tools to help achieve its goal. The core tool, Chemhacktica, is a software platform that uses machine learning to map chemical pathways for synthesizing desired molecules. It suggests potential chemical reactions, identifies precursor materials, and checks their availability for purchase.
The other is Microlab, an open-source controlled lab reactor built from affordable, off-the-shelf components costing between $300 and $500. It uses Chemhacktica's suggested pathways to create medications, and detailed instructions for building and operating the Microlab are provided. Additionally, the company developed a drag-and-drop recipe system called Apothecarium that generates executable files for the Microlab, offering step-by-step guidance on producing specific medications.
Laufer told 404 Media: "I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, 'Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They're not applicable and they're being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it's not OK.'"
Further reading: Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine (Motherboard; 2018)
Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do "right to repair for your body." Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves' had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it. [...]
Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn't shilling random supplements, and doesn't have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves. "We don't invent anything, really," Laufer said. "We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like 'This works, but you can't get it.' Well, here's a way to get it." A slide at his talk reads "Isn't this illegal? Yeah. Grow up." Four Thieves has developed a suite of open-source tools to help achieve its goal. The core tool, Chemhacktica, is a software platform that uses machine learning to map chemical pathways for synthesizing desired molecules. It suggests potential chemical reactions, identifies precursor materials, and checks their availability for purchase.
The other is Microlab, an open-source controlled lab reactor built from affordable, off-the-shelf components costing between $300 and $500. It uses Chemhacktica's suggested pathways to create medications, and detailed instructions for building and operating the Microlab are provided. Additionally, the company developed a drag-and-drop recipe system called Apothecarium that generates executable files for the Microlab, offering step-by-step guidance on producing specific medications.
Laufer told 404 Media: "I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, 'Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They're not applicable and they're being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it's not OK.'"
Further reading: Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine (Motherboard; 2018)
With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, wait, a shitton already has. Start with the Tuskegee, Alabama and Guatemala Syphilis Experiments, include the Anthrax & radiation experiments on our own troops, and throw in MK Ultra, Agent Orange, Project SHAD, and the Willowbrook State School Hepatitis Study and one may have more than a little cause for skepticism of a huge government colluding with a huge industry (isn't that one of the defining features of fascism? hmm, but I digress)
It's a good thing this didn't happen during CV19 or they'd have probably shut it down for making anything. If the solutions don't cost trillions and come from Daddy, we aren't allowed to have them and that gets old. Kudos to these guys. They are hacker-heroes as far as I'm concerned and information wants to be free.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Funny)
In the current US medical system, bad things are *guaranteed* to happen. One bad thing is people's wallets getting emptied, another bad thing is people failing to get care because they cannot afford (or are afraid they won't be able to afford) the care they need.
As a big proponent of freedom of choice, free market, and the need to hand out more Darwin Awards, I approve of this idea of being able to cook up your own medicines or buy from your neighbor who doesn't have a medical or chemistry education.
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Clean reactions would be my biggest concern. Plenty of evidence of dirty reactions in home made pharma. Methyl alcohol poisoning making moonshine is one example. Go back about 15 years and look at all the issues with people trying to cook meth. I mean peoples teeth were falling out and shit. Never saw that from a licensed lab making dexadrine.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
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So we should just not have regulations and accountability. That will surely make things better!" - said no sane person, ever.
Yeah but there are a lot of insane people.
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Re: With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
This screams of an analogy to open source versus commercial software, especially the security stuff that costs a ton to get a federal stamp (ex. voting machines).
Also, PGP style web of trust versus centralized certificate authorities defining trust (ex. SSL cert).
instead ... it's "I trust these DIY instructions are sufficient ..."
A user doesn't have to trust those instructions on their own. They have a web of trust - all the contributors and users; The many eyes approach.
Speaking of which, how many independent groups have fully reviewed and tested the full process used to create misoprostol? I'm sure it's had some review, maybe even by some authorities in the field, but it's not exactly open source where we all have at least the opportunity to review it and test it ourselves. And before anyone replies with some, "bUt No OnE cAn Be ExPeCtEd To AcTuAlLy ReAd AnD uDeRsTaNd It!" let me note that is exactly the argument people use against open source in general, and voting machines in particular. IE: you'll find the answers are the same.
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Actually the guys from the-odin.com made a DIY vaccine and documented their progress but they were censored as misinformation by youtube.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments should just buy patent licences for these drugs and make them available to their citizens at cost. It would probably be cheaper than buying them at commercial rates.
The UK's NHS shows how this can work. They negotiate discounted rates that everyone living here then has access to.
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I wanted to volunteer with my local alma mater, but looking through the department that I wanted to contact the researchers had tunnel vision surrounding some drugs that they had come up with and of cours
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Governments should just buy patent licences for these drugs and make them available to their citizens at cost. It would probably be cheaper than buying them at commercial rates.
The UK's NHS shows how this can work. They negotiate discounted rates that everyone living here then has access to.
And that is what the Biden government has been doing, much to the anger of the Republicans. They negotiated with Ely Lily to reduce the unit cost of Insulin to $35, whilst its a huge drop from the previous price (which could be as high as $100) it's still several times more expensive than the UK's $7.25 (which is covered under a NHS surcharge exemption if it's an essential medication, so free at the point of use).
This is not the only pharmaceutical they've done this for... Imagine how much they could sav
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Just make it so that a condition of getting a licence for a new drug is that it gets licenced to the government at a reasonable cost.
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What happens when somebody dies and the police/FBI/courts/whoever get involved? Asking for a friend.
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What happens when somebody dies and the police/FBI/courts/whoever get involved? Asking for a friend.
When safe and effective prescription drugs kill people, it's just considered a side effect.
The leading causes of death in Europe and US are in order: 1. Heart Disease
2. Cancer
3. Prescription drugs
I've had 4 family members or friends who were basically healthy, then died because of a prescription drug side effect.
Point is, these garage drugs have a long way to go to catch up with the system's level of killing people https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
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I like your examples. It shows how absurd your position is given that they are all examples which led to strict regulations being put in place by "Daddy Government".
Notice how you didn't cite anything more recent than 1960? You want to know why? I'll give you a hint it starts with the word "Government" and ends in "Regulations"
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I like your examples. It shows how absurd your position is given that they are all examples which led to strict regulations being put in place by "Daddy Government".
Notice how you didn't cite anything more recent than 1960? You want to know why? I'll give you a hint it starts with the word "Government" and ends in "Regulations"
To your point, and from the US government:
"We should take far fewer drugs, and patients should carefully study the package inserts of the drugs their doctors prescribe for them and independent information sources about drugs such as Cochrane reviews, which will make it easier for them to say "no thanks" ".
This fact of prescription drugs being the third leading cause of death, right behind Heart disease and cancer, is not a government conspiracy, more like a quixotic quest to tamp down the populous' de
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Start with the Tuskegee, Alabama and Guatemala Syphilis Experiments,
Which occurred BEFORE there were the stringent regulations we have today on medical experimentation.
throw in MK Ultra, Agent Orange, Project SHAD, and the Willowbrook State School Hepatitis Study
Three military experiments and again, something done BEFORE the vast amount of regulations we have now.
What you're saying is we learned from all those things which were done BEFORE the regulations we have now to make things safer. In other words, w
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Yeah, let's just trust Daddy Government and Big Pharma, I'm sure they have our best interests in heart and totally aren't fleecing or fucking us. What could go wrong? Oh, wait, a shitton already has. Start with the Tuskegee, Alabama and Guatemala Syphilis Experiments, include the Anthrax & radiation experiments on our own troops, and throw in MK Ultra, Agent Orange, Project SHAD, and the Willowbrook State School Hepatitis Study and one may have more than a little cause for skepticism of a huge government colluding with a huge industry (isn't that one of the defining features of fascism? hmm, but I digress) It's a good thing this didn't happen during CV19 or they'd have probably shut it down for making anything. If the solutions don't cost trillions and come from Daddy, we aren't allowed to have them and that gets old. Kudos to these guys. They are hacker-heroes as far as I'm concerned and information wants to be free.
Okay, but that is not a response to the comment to which you are replying. Your response in no way addresses the concerns raised by engineer37's point; you merely raise a different point. However valid your point may or may not be, it is not a response to his/hers.
Re: With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this different than the public using "household chemicals" like bleach? If used improperly, it could kill you too. Just like canning food at home. Or guns. Or driving a car. Or anything else that we all agree that adults can do even when it's dangerous. Adults makes their own decisions.
If a molecule is simple enough to make, it should not be out of reach of anyone.
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People have been preserving food at home for millennia. We just used too be good at discerning how long the preserved food stuff were edible though.
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This is why we need to make home distilling of alcohol for personal use 100% legal Federally and in each state.
WE got brewing beer done years back, let's do the next logical step, eh?
Fair point (Score:5, Informative)
Ah yes, random amateurs printing drugs at home, what could possibly go wrong? I'm all for small companies more easily manufacturing drugs, and the technology to support that... but remember that awful neighbor you had that one time? You know the one. Do you really want him printing random drugs? Is he responsible enough for that? Really?
You're not wrong, but you're also making a straw man argument.
We don't have to go as far as back-alley drug cooking. We could go partway, allowing certain drugs to be made by amateurs using known methods and supply them with the precursors they need as well.
To draw an analogy, in my state (NH) you need a hairdressor's license to apply hair dye to a client. People have pointed out that hair dye is available over the counter and that anyone can apply the dye to themselves (and it's not hard), so why is the license required? It's extra friction preventing people from opening hairdressor salons in the state.
I worked with a person who was designing a reaction chamber to make some of the simpler medicines, his goal was to allow poorer nations to make their own versions of some of the simpler drugs out in the field. He was specifically interested in African villages with virtually no money. It was a plastic slab with chambers, you fill the chambers with specific chemicals, the system mixed the chemicals in the right proportions and produced the medicine in a final chamber.
(Project didn't work out, but I thought the concept was interesting.)
Medical science appears to be at a standstill. It costs a half a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, which means the only drugs companies will look at are the ones that a) apply to everyone, and b) don't cure anything. Things like Ibuprofin, something that everyone can use. We've got lots and lots of diseases that affect 100K people or less in this country... and despite lots of research there will never be any treatments. Once a company is halfway into a new drug development and finds side effects, there's *enormous* pressure to force the drug through rather than start over. Take a look at psychiatric drugs some time and note whether they actually cure anything.
I've seen a presentation at a convention where the presenters claimed to have a cure for migraines. It was sort of a small hockey stick thingy, you place the curved end at the back of your neck and press a button, the stick gives a magnetic pulse, and the migraine disappears. Their claim was that the system worked and completely stopped the migraine, but that they didn't have enough money to bring the device to market.
Hearing aids are, in a technological sense, simple... but cost a fortune and require a professional to install. You can't purchase a commodity hearing aid and tune it using an app on your phone, even though it seems like that should be straightforward.
There's a self-adjustable [engineeringforchange.org] version of eyeglasses for poor African communities, you put the glasses on and adjust the fluid between the two lenses, and when the vision is the best it can get you lock down the valve and use them from that point on. But you can't do that in the US, you have to go through an expensive diagnosis and order fitted frames.
Lots and lots of things we do in this nation are stupidly expensive, and yes it's to maximize safety, but we've lost sight of the real purpose of medicine, which is to actually cure people.
We can change the system, maybe loosen the laws and procedures a little to allow more innovation and bring down costs a little...
And do that without going to back-alley drug cooking.
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Considering how much governments spend on defence, it seems like they could direct a few billion to new drugs on behalf of their citizens, and then own the rights to them and manufacture them at cost.
The global R&D budget for new medicines is something like 40bn euro, easily affordable by the larger unions like the EU and US, let alone if it was done through the WHO or something like that.
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Re: Fair point (Score:2)
Re:Fair point (Score:4, Interesting)
To draw an analogy, in my state (NH) you need a hairdressor's license to apply hair dye to a client. People have pointed out that hair dye is available over the counter and that anyone can apply the dye to themselves (and it's not hard), so why is the license required?
I actually know the answer to this one due to working in IT for L'Oreal. Hair dressers don't use consumer grade hair products, they use products designated professional grade. You as an individual can't even buy that grade directly, it's only sold to hair dressing businesses. Many professional grade hair products are made from chemicals that are explosive if combined in the wrong order or the wrong amounts, and others produce poisonous gas at speed and quantities that can quickly incapacitate or suffocate people. The hazard labels on the boxes and trucks leaving the warehouse are terrifying, and the fact that the warehouses have separate sections to try to prevent any spilled chemicals from mixing and killing everyone in the building is just as scary. Thus the requirement to train and license people to use these dangerous products.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider, it may be the only access some people have to life saving drugs. If you don't want to see it happen, make the professionally made drugs affordable.
Will some people screw it up? Of course. Would I buy such drugs from some rando on the street? NO! Would I trust myself to make them? If that's the only choice, yes.
On the other hand, at one time it was illegal for anyone but the barely trained station attendant to pump gas. This was supposed to be for safety reasons.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is: you may also have that neighbor who is good at this. You know, the retired teacher, the part-time chemist, or whatever.
Drug discovery and testing does cost a lot of money, and the drug companies deserve to be able to earn that money back. But there need to be limits. Let's take the Sovaldi example from the article. What are the drug companies (and probably the middlemen, the insurance companies) charging? A course of treatment requires 84 tablets (one table daily for 12 weeks). Prices approximate, calling Euro, dollar and franc as roughly the same value:
- In the USA: $84000 (according the article)
- In Switzerland: $28000 (normally the highest prices in Europe)
- In France: $22000
So someone, somewhere in the US is more than tripling the price of an already very expensive drug. Obamacare: you've got to pass the act before you can find out what's in it.
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Informative)
... Obamacare: you've got to pass the act before you can find out what's in it.
Ah, that old chestnut that Republicans misquoted (as you did above), took completely out of context, and intentionally misrepresented as if to mean that it was Congress that had to pass the bill before they could learn what was in it, when of course Congress had had access to the original text of the bill for over a year, and only the amendments made as concessions to Republicans were new edits made in the few days before the vote. (Although Obama really screwed up by making the original bill already a compromise package, so that when the inevitable compromises started anyway, he lost ground. What a newb.)
Pelosi made that remark when speaking to the National Association of Counties' annual Legislative Conference, and it was those members of the public whom she was suggesting would have to wait until the bill was passed before they could see all the wonderful benefits it would bring, which she had just iterated. (Which is why the actual quote is "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.") But go ahead; keep using it as a casual snarky dig that's actually a lie. That's fair; some liberals still claim that Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her porch (when it was Tina Fey who said that), so I guess it's all even Steven.
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Do you really want him printing random drugs? Is he responsible enough for that? Really?
Do you really think people around the world aren't on the daily injecting / injecting things that haven't been made irresponsibly? Do you think the speed you buy from your local kid down the street was manufacture red by a pharmaceutical company with strict quality control processes and ISO 9001 accreditation?
Many medications involve simple reactions of materials using tools you can easily buy at a science supply store. We made paracetamol (acetaminophen for your Americans) in my CHEM101 class first year in
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Ah yes the ever persuasive myth that we should give up our rights to prevent that sketchy randomly intentioned neighbor from having them. Instead we should trust the warm fuzzy government, led by people whose career path is the pure and unadulterated pursuit of power over their fellow man at gunpoint.
Bottom line, I'm fine with letting Darwin sort myself and my neighbor out and the last thing either of us need is some other neighbor thinking it is his place to prevent us from gaining access to and utilizing
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. At least until the US healthcare industry can be reigned in. But we all
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Ah yes, random amateurs printing drugs at home, what could possibly go wrong? I'm all for small companies more easily manufacturing drugs, and the technology to support that... but remember that awful neighbor you had that one time? You know the one. Do you really want him printing random drugs? Is he responsible enough for that? Really?
Then again, there are a lot of people killed every year by safe and effective prescription drugs, manufacturerd by pharmaceutical companies, obtained via prescription from doctors, and distributed as prescribed.
Another thing not many think of is that after a point, you are now in the system. You will be encouraged to report symptoms, be subscribed increasing number of drugs, then it starts to spiral, as side effects mount, you can end up taking quite the cocktail of drugs.
Most concerning to me is the
Re:With great power comes great stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, Four Thieves was actually inspired by Central American narco labs, after a trip where they learned that these narco labs were all over the place and yet local pharmacies were often out of important medications.
BTW, I watched one of their videos [archive.org], and my take: while the presentation is slow and the guy really needs to hire an editor, the info seems to be handled as responsibly as you could. This was for the abortion drug misoprostol. And their key ingredient was... misoprostol. That is, it wasn't about how to manufacture the drug per se, but how to acquire and dose it. They go into first how to find black market chemical suppliers and their study on how accurate black market suppliers are in terms of providing what they claim to provide (their preliminary results: surprisingly, very good, and if they do cheat you, it's in all odds just be with buffer / filler - but still, at your own risk), but then go into an easier solution, which is veterinary misoprostol designed for treating common ulcers in horses. This too is technically regulated (need a vet prescription), but there's a very widely used grey market for people who want to dose their horses themselves. They then show how to determine how much to use per tablet and properly measure it, how to blend it with a binder (corn starch or powdered milk), and to press it into tablets with a bee pollen press (used by people who take bee pollen as a supplement), and provide the treatment regimen (letting it dissolve in the cheek for half an hour). This is for pure misoprostol, which is 85% effective. He goes into the possibility of the use alongside mifepristone, which raises effectiveness to 95%, but with the challenge that you have to rely on on the aforementioned chemical suppliers, but that with the mifepristone it only needs to be swallowed so you only need gelcaps, which are easy to get (and again, goes into dosing and preparation).
So, you know, the videos about actual chemical synthesis might be much iffier than this - obviously, the worry is side reactions, improper purification, etc etc. But this wasn't as bad as I was expecting.
Health care costs too much (Score:5, Insightful)
The elephant in the room is that health care, i.e. the usual kind that you get from hospitals and doctors, costs too much in America.
All the talk about "rights to" this and that only detracts from the problem. If one could get affordable health care, have your body examined by qualified professionals, how many people would "hack" their own bodies? And who would care if some do hack their own bodies?
"Hacking" one's own body became an issue because unaffordable health care forces some people to choose between hacking their bodies to reduce medical costs, or going bankrupt and die from lack of medical treatment. More importantly, people popularizing such body hacking eats into the profits of BigPharma, who else has the resources to buy up media coverage to bring attention to this otherwise?
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I think this would be a good use case for Web of Trust. Shouldn't be too hard to smuggle some legit medicine from legit and qualified chemists or resellers. Web of Trust would let you verify who you're interacting with and get a decent idea of their reputation.
Yes it's a bit dangerous, but as you say the source of the problem is our legislature letting people die to protect the profits of big pharma, if alternatives became available anyways they might be willing to legalize it. Of course the alleged party o
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The people who spend so much time talking about "freedom" and call themselves Republicans love to see corporations profit, even from things that they didn't invent themselves. Insulin for example, isn't something that needs to have R&D money paid back, and the actual cost to manufacture is very low, so why is there such a high cost for it in the USA? Because Republicans want there to be zero regulation, and they don't want there to be government services where the government can produce and provide
This makes no sense (Score:2)
Companies own secret formularies and they jealously guard them. Our "generics" are reverse engineered trash from India. How tf do you just "drag and drop and create a drug" that is a trade secret with any confidence without a team of experts and specialized equipment?
Re:This makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
Drug companies do patent, and how to make most of their drugs is known. But they play games to extend the legal monopoly:
Re: This makes no sense (Score:2)
Worse than that, they will sometimes develop a new, safer version of a drug, then delay its market introduction until the patent on the old drug expires. See Gilead HIV drugs TDF and TAF. And then ask me why my T-score is -4.0 .
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That is the craziest instance of the past 5 years.
They develop a drug that prevents HIV infection. It has some potentially nasty side effects on important things like your kidneys, but logically it's still better to take it because if you don't and you end up with HIV, you'll now be taking stronger versions of the same kinds of drugs, so you'll have all the negative side effects and HIV with multiple other potential complications. So they can set the MSRP at $3000/month and let the system absorb the excess.
That's *one* way not to have the disease anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
You're certain to make *a* chemical.
Whether it's the one you want, and in the correct dosage? And did you filter out everything else in your beaker? Those are much harder questions.
There are very few chemicals I'd be willing to Walter White up in my garage, and then ingest or inject.
Honestly, if you're willing to commit felonies to get these drugs, you're probably better off just cooking meth, selling it, and then using the profits to buy the actual drugs.
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That would be amoral and illegal! :-o
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Here's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
People with the skills to accurately make the stuff usually have the money to buy the manufactured product
People with little money also often have few skills
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In many cases you don't need skills. Sure you're not going to make everything, but there's a world of drugs that are dead simple to make. You need knowledge, and the point here is that someone does that heavy brain lifting for you leaving you with simple instructions.
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Has anyone validated his claims? (Score:3)
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He's probably not checking for purity at that cost. He likely spent much more than $.89 developing and perfecting a way to produce mifepristone "at home", and the cited cost assumes that you're following instructions perfectly when synthesizing the compound.
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In the UK, paracetamol retails in little boxes of 16x500mg for £0.35. The packaging probably costs more to make than the drug.
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I for one find it hard to believe that misoprostol can be made for $0.89
In my place the un-subsidised public price for misoprostol (Cytotec) pack of 20 pills 0.2 mg, 5.30 €, making it 0.26 € a unit. (If you go through the public system, the government gives a 30% discount on that price.)
The molecule might be expensive to synthetize, but since you only need 0.2 mg you just have to synthetize 100 grams in the lab and you have enough for half a million pills. With that tiny amount in a pill, the plastic blister must cost more than the chemical itself.
The group has a wiki page (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Laufer claims that they have successfully synthesized cabotegravir, an experimental new integrase inhibitor, and asked heroin dealers to cut their product with it in order to help lower the rates of HIV infection among heroin users.[1]
If heroin dealers end our HIV problems, we should probably string up all our politicians and put the drug dealers in charge.
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It won't. Most new HIV infections still come from sexual transmission. Needle users only represent a small portion of HIV carriers.
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It won't. Most new HIV infections still come from sexual transmission. Needle users only represent a small portion of HIV carriers.
And the government has a huge amount of power to help both.
Promoting sexual health (using condoms, stop the shame over STDs) but that won't happen because the religious nutters believing "sex is baaaaad m'kay".
Set up safe injecting rooms, methadone programs to help users kick the habit. Safe injecting rooms not only made it safer for heroin addicts in Australia (and Scotland too I believe) but also severely reduced the number of used needles found in public places as they could be disposed of properl
"Anarchist Collective"???? (Score:2)
LOL!
Then again, there are people out there who think that anarchists wear uniforms.
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Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Dosage and quality control (including avoiding harmful contaminants) won't be possible, but if prices are deliberately inflated 160-fold or more, then I can certainly sympathise.
Especially in the cases of medicines for things that have a high risk of being lethal.
Having said that, it may not be the best solution to price gouging.
Completely insane (Score:2)
Running a reaction is one thing (if you are lucky enough not to poison yourself - their promoted set-up does not even include a standard hood). But distributing stuff with no proper purification and, even worse, zero analytics is plainly criminal.
Re:Completely insane (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of it as an indictment of how broken the system is that people who literally cannot afford anything else turn to solutions like this.
Someone has got to pay the research costs (Score:3)
There can be no doubt that a new drug costs of the order of a $1bn to discover, develop, TEST and distribute. No doubt BigPharma takes more than it should at times, but ignoring the 'who is to pay' issue is very simplistic.
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True, of course. But unless people can answer the core question of who should pay for drug development, they aren't to be taken too seriously, and locking them up is not entirely unreasonable.
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The costs for development and testing of pharmaceuticals is very heavily subsidized by our tax dollars. So the answer is the people pay. Twice.
US healthcare. Aweseome! [/sarcasm] (Score:3)
To be fair: I know people who make their own drugs in Germany. Their child as an extremely rare genetic condition and making meds for that is basically a world-wide homebrew community of 30 people or so.
Other than that, I totally get why USians are in a position where it's feasible to homebrew medication. It's the US healthcare system. Meaning the more or less non-existent healthcare system. You guys might want to fix that before regulating homebrew medication.
A better source for magistral preparation? (Score:5, Informative)
That is something different (Score:2)
Magistral preparation means a pharmacist prepares an ointment, eye drops etc. by compounding raw pharmaceutical compounds with solvents, ointment bases, etc.. This is pure galenics. Pharmacists do NOT chemically synthesize pharmaceutical ingredients. Extracting ingredients from natural products to obtain some substance is maybe a borderline case.
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An European perspective (Score:2)
From an European perspective, this sounds more like a commentary on the unequal access to healthcare over there in the US. In Sweden, you pay at most 1200 SEK (around 120 USD) per year for prescription drugs. Doctor and hospital visits normally cost 100-400 SEK (10-40 USD) each, but also have a separate price cap of 1200 SEK.
Granted; the system is not perfect (a small number of experimental drugs or very rare drugs may not yet be covered), but the total cost for all citizen seems to be far lower, with far l
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In Sweden, you pay at most 1200 SEK (around 120 USD) per year for prescription drugs. Doctor and hospital visits normally cost 100-400 SEK (10-40 USD) each, but also have a separate price cap of 1200 SEK.
You're all very lucky over there. I can't even imagine what that kind of freedom is like. Stateside, I pay $600 a month for ACA insurance, $280/month for my prescriptions, $320 to one provider, $240 to another, and $500 to a third.
Tried it out (Score:3)
So I know very little about organic chemistry, but semaglutide is the sexy drug that's hard to get at present. Wikipedia has the SMILES code for it and you can use a free guest account on chemhacktica so why not see what it suggests as precursors? Could we make Ozempic at home?
Unfortunately, it errors out. It can draw the molecule but all the tools that try to construct a pathway for synthesising it result in generic errors. No idea if that's because I got something wrong or the molecule is too complex for the tool or what.
I guess organic chemistry is actually nearly as hard as it looks.
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The other way to increase your GLP-1 to GIP incretin ratio is to eat food with structure. Nothing diced, blended, processed or otherwise altered to be rapidly digestible. The further reaches of your gut release GLP-1 mostly. The upper reaches release GIP mostly. Processed food is absorbed quickly and so leads to the release of more GIP than GLP-1. Unprocessed food that retains its structure survives to the lower reaches of the gut and so leads to the release of more GLP-1.
No need for drugs. Just alter what
Semaglutide is a peptide (with some decorations) (Score:2)
The core structure is made by a genetically modified yeast, which needs to be grown under very controlled conditions in a sterile bioreactor. Good luck with that in your home lab.
The first experimental samples were actually made synthetically - by a sequence of close to 100 distinct chemical reactions. Good luck again, and this approach will be orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying the product.
has anybody else check their warrant Canary (Score:2)
It's about 3 weeks old
Somebody should tell them to update it
It's the same in Cryptography (Score:2)
"Leave the cryptography to the experts" they said.
"Don't roll your own crypto" they said.
Well how the hell is anyone going to become and expert without rolling their own for a while to learn the ropes?
I can roll my own crypto. I can build my own crypto hardware. Because I am an expert with the requisite skills and I only got there by rolling my own bad crypto until I got good enough to understand what's safe, what proven, what's helping and what's hurting.
I assume it's the same for chemistry. Try it. test i
Um (Score:2)
Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn't shilling random supplements, and doesn't have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves.
"Crucially, we, the writers, approve of what this group is saying, so they should be allowed to speak. (Others, of course, are devils and should still not be allowed to speak.)"
How can they be trusted? (Score:2)
Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin
That right there proves they're a bunch of charlatans. With all those experts telling us horse paste absolutely works to cure covid, how can we trust these folks to be on the up and up?
I don't think so. (Score:2)
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TV show pitch meeting... (Score:2)
Science teacher with diabetes can't afford the medication, so he start making and selling it on the street.
That's it. And we'll call it "Welcome to America". What? No, "Breaking Bad" is a horrible name for a TV show.
Said like a true mathematician (Score:2)
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Of course, in countries that have universal healthcare & the biggest buyers of pharmaceuticals are governments, the pricing dynamics are quite different & drugs tend to be more affordable, usually a small prescription char
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
In other words, many countries are relying on the US, and the skyhigh prices that US citizens pay, for the R&D needed for new medicines, and new medical tech in general. I dont have a problem with this, but it should be p
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Huh? Got any proof of any of that? That it actually works? Why didn't they show these results to Steve Jobs when he had cancer on condition that he pay them $1 billion if the tumor is eradicated?
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Also, crack cocaine addicts would never get cancer then because a lot of it is cut with baking soda.
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They don't.
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Carroll, C. P., Bolland, H., Vancauwenberghe, E., Collier, P., Ritchie, A. A., Clarke, P. A., Grabowska, A. M., Harris, A. L., & McIntyre, A. (2022). Targeting hypoxia regulated sodium driven bicarbonate transporters reduces triple negative breast cancer metastasis. Neoplasia (New York, N.Y.), 25, 41–52. [doi.org]
Nief, C. A., Gonzales, A., Chelales, E., Agudogo, J. S., Crouch, B. T., Nair, S. K., & Ramanujam, N. (2022). Targeting Tumor Acido [doi.org]
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There is a lot wrong with this urban legend but lets starts by at least pinning it down. Which one, baking powder or baking soda? They aren't the same thing.
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Ironic that they take a great and empowering concept and instead of using to promote DIY medicine that could help people they push poison pills to kill kids.