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.
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.
With the same risk to blindness as moonshine?
That was due to additives to ethanol cleaning agents - it was a thing done on purpose
If you’re going to die because you can’t afford it, then does the risk really matter?
And when you do die, you won’t see it coming!
I you make your own, there is no risk for blindness. Blindness comes from methanol, not ethanol. If you use a yeast based process to produce the alcohol and then distill it, there is no way to accidentally produce methanol in that process. The cases where people get blind or die from moonshine stems from when the feds replaced moonshine with methanol to be able to make that claim and disrupt the business of organized crime during the prohibition. There are still cases now and then where people try to make drinkable alcohol from some industrial base and don’t know how to.
TLDR: Don’t buy, make.
And use copper pot still with silver solder.
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.
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
I personally think open source software and hardware is a good starting point to making DIY stuff legal in the future.
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 happy 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.
Move to Canada.
Instructions unclear, moved to Alberta and I’m surrounded by Trump flags and austerity measures.
Canada doesn’t accept just anyone for no reason.
Can confirm. I tried. Long time ago. Spoke to a lady at a Canadian Embassy.
I didn’t meet the education requirements.
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 fantastic. If you know what the problem is, because you’ve been diagnosed or whatever, and you know what medicine will do it, and you are capable of making it, I see no issue at all with this. You don’t need a PhD in computer science to browse the internet.
You’ve gone to a malicious website. Now you’ve died.
See, the risks of surfing the web incorrectly are slightly different than the risks of creating medicine incorrectly.
You’ve committed the “crime” of being poor while diagnosed with a lethal (but curable) illness that you can’t afford. Now you’ve died.
See, the risks of being poor are slightly different than the risks of not being poor.
Surely. But let’s be realistic. If you’re poor and sick, you’re broke and have no free time.
You wouldn’t download a
carlife saving medicine!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?
Did you really call the US healthcare system the best in the world?
No. Of course not. I put it in quotes since I was being sarcastic.
No, they specifically put it in quotes, to make the distinction.
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 NHS 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.
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.
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
Here’s a fun thought, the drug you make fails but doesn’t kill you.
Instead you now have another life long ailment that cause pain/degradation of daily life.
Sounds like a great idea.
And that’s different from the commercial pharmaceutical industry how?
Commercial drugs are giving people life long diseases on top of the ones they’re trying to cure?
News to me, got any source?
Never heard of, eg, Vioxx or thalidomide, I take it?
The most notorious is probably thalidomide, but there are plenty others on this list of withdrawn drugs that cause long-term side effects.
Very interesting, I wasn’t aware of specifics. Obviously I don’t think it’s impossible, but I would think that the grand majority don’t, while this bootleg technique would have a higher rate of creating worse problems for people already suffering and essentially sealing their fate.
We need to tackle big pharma for the problem it is: greed and neglect and I don’t think a pirated solution will make that in any way better for people.
Maybe it does for some but hurts others worse. Which is the same coin as big pharma but worse for some. That’s my perspective, but I hope that an open-source style solution would gain more traction rather than one that’s essentially just ripped music.
People deserve to be healthy
As opposed to dying from the disease you already have because the traditional pharmaceutical industry makes the drugs you need out of your price range?
It won’t be a life long ailment for long if you’re going to die from a lack of care soon anyways.
No no.
In addition to
And stop pretending that the only people to use this are those that would absolutely need it. You know damn well penny pinchers would also go after this
This seems both awesome and dangerous. The two analogies that come to mind are home canning and home brewing. They’re both generally safe and easy. But every so often someone gives their family botulism.
True. A lot of drugs you can perform tests on. But there is an inherent risk. I don’t think making medicine at home is going to be many people’s first choice. I think the people most likely to pursue this are those for whom obtaining medication other ways is not possible. When the government makes it impossible for someone to obtain health care, either due to literally making it illegal or by allowing it to become completely unaffordable for working class people, then they have to resort to other options.
With patience and diligent work it is possible to make many medications with (by comparison) significantly cheaper resources. And if someone were to do this, presumably, there are others who also have similar needs for the medications being produced. Which is how community medicine networks are formed. DIY Hormone replacement medications for trans people living in places where it’s illegal for them to access medication, or otherwise extremely difficult often access medicines made through networks like that.
This isn’t really a new thing, but the ease of access to documentation on how to do it certainly is new.
Yup. The trans community has been doing this with HRT meds for YEARS because it was either straight up illegal, or almost impossible to obtain access because of the dozens of hoops you had to jump through.
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
Hail Four Thieves Vinegar Collective!
More DIY, right to repair, open source living.
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.
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 foe 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.
Oh, also I have an exceedingly rare hereditary disease, so it feels like a certainty I’ll need it for myself someday.
They have released a guide on making a CLR (basically several different pieces of lab equipment controlled to automate some of the process) and software to run on it to assist in the process of making the medications. Specifically to try and improve consistency of the medications produced.
It’s a really great cause. Worth reading the article. If someone had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars cost to access life-saving medication, and they couldn’t afford it, something like this could legitimately save their life.
And it’s only made more inspiring by the fact that he has his own personal history with the pharmaceutical industry that didn’t work for him.
I found another article on him and the collective, and there’s this honestly saddening quote:
“A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS,” Laufer said, raising a glass of bourbon and quoting the hip hop artist Felipe Andres Coronel, better known as Immortal Technique. “A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved.”
It’s even posted up on their page for the MicroLab right at the top.
By far one of the most interesting articles I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, thanks for the link
404 Media is doing excellent work; if you like this kind of thing you might want to sign up for their newsletter.
…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.
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, 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
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, eg lidocaine patches. It has to be injected to really do much. Not aware of any injectables that are over the counter.
What’s broken is largely insurance setting prices.
I don’t see this fixing it.
