https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pngb/how-to-make-your-own-medicine-four-thieves-vinegar-collective
This is the stupidest fucking thing I've read about all year.
I remember hearing a drug researcher at a modern drug research company explain that if Insulin was created today, it wouldn't get FDA approval because the methods that were used to test it back in the day would be seen as unethical and not possible to pursue in our current environment. I don't know if that's true, but it should give serious moment for pause.
how so?
There is a complete lack of quality control over pharmaceuticals produced by this method: no way to confirm identity, no way to check purity, no accountability whatsoever. Anyone who thinks this is going to help more people than it harms is either dangerously naive or maliciously stupid.
I don't think this is the solution but I don't think the current path is at all viable long term either.
Regulations are important for sure, there is an issue though with how they've been developed or rolled out often times though, as uninformed politicians draft laws that lead to ineffectual policies.
I don't believe the rules around drugs have been designed thoughtfully.
Thalidimide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs
Your point summed up nicely in this video.
The disaster that was Thalidimide was required for things to be improved in many ways.
It really is only through mistakes that we change or learn.
at the same time, pharmaceuticals are becoming ever more prohibitively expensive. i personally believe that freely providing documentation on the synthesis processes of medicines is important, even if we aren't at a stage where widespread and safe DIY synthesis of them is possible. it lays the groundwork for a world where it is. i find myself agreeing with this segment of the article
Von Hippel and DeMonaco were in agreement that the ability to purify DIY drugs and run quality control tests on the final product is paramount for their safe use by patients. Von Hippel suggested that scientists with a background in medicinal chemistry will be necessary to address these issues in DIY pharma.
“I see Michael Laufer’s activities as a valuable form of social activism that points the way to a promising future,” von Hippel said. “But I think the equipment and the medicinal science issues have to be much further developed before DIY medicine production will be safe.”
we might not have the technology now, but it will not always be that case
That could be referring to things like this
In 1889, the physician Oskar Minkowski, in collaboration with Joseph von Mering, removed the pancreas from a healthy dog to test its assumed role in digestion
You'd probably have a hard time getting that past an ethics committee today
Actually now that you remind me, it wasn't about Insulin.
It was about the Jonas Salk Polio vaccine.
We could not have created that under todays medical atmosphere
Anarchism is retarded because you will eventually get a company big enough to absorb other companies and make people pay a 'fee', as well as make people follow 'rules', you'll end up transitioning into a government of some form anyways.
it only works as a transitional phase. No matter how good it goes you end up just making a government anyways. Someone will get enough power to make it happen.
You know I agree that it's horrible, but at the same time it says some real fuckin' hard truths about the world we live in that people feel like they have to resort to that.
personally i think anarchism is best served from within a state, having a system to try and live outside of gives impetus to innovate
They're expensive not because they're hard to synthesise (most of the time anyway), they're expensive because it costs a lot of money to develop them. In return for their efforts, the USPTO grants patent protection and the FDA grants market exclusivity, both for a set period of time, during which those who developed the drug can profit from it. You can argue that such a system needs to be tweaked or changed, but suggesting that everyone starts making their own drugs is ludicrous and demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the issues at hand.
Most people can't even be trusted to cook their own food without burning something. How are they going to run a reaction using BuLi at –30°C under an inert atmosphere? How are they going to analyse the product for presence of potential genotoxic impurities? How are they going to confirm the structure of their product without NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, or even just IR spectroscopy? Anyone who thinks that these issues can be solved by the magic wand of technology desperately needs to talk to some actual chemists.
part of it being so expensive is because of how strict FDA regulations are compared to much of the world, from what i understand. i don't think regular people should be out there cooking up their own meds, as you said most people couldn't be trusted to do that. what i do think, though, is that it is not impossible to make production of medicine more localized or at the least less concentrated in large pharmaceutical corporations. things like in-house production of medicines in hospitals or smaller-scale production labs serving their local area, especially in the instance of rare diseases with rare treatments or drugs tailored to the individual.
Knew this would be a Vice article by the title alone.
Yes but the problem with that is as usual someone has to come along and fuck it up for everyone, and now the industry is corrupt as fuck and they've used the systems in place to keep people safe to reap in massive profits at huge markup and they don't have to worry about competition even on drugs which are simple.
The problem is always corrupt ass holes getting away with everything.
You're understanding is incorrect, most of the complaints about strictness is actually in regards to 'healthy' foods, dietary supplements and homeopathy regulations.
FDA rules haven't become more or less restrictive since the 60s in regards to pharma development. The real burden is that its becoming increasingly difficult to create new medicines. Since 1950, our prouduction of new medicines has been going down by half every year in an exponential curve.
That's what makes things like CRISPr so important.
Regulations are about the same in every first world country. The reason why they exist is twofold. Safety is the most obvious and probably the one that everyone is aware of, but that's only half of the equation. Unsafe drugs are mostly weeded out in preclinical and phase I trials, which are relatively cheap to run. The hard part is proving efficacy, which usually requires large and expensive trials, sometimes run over many years.
I really don't think the problems you mentioned are significant enough to justify upending our current system of manufacturing and distributing drugs. There is zero advantage to decentralised manufacturing of drugs. Economies of scale mean its much cheaper to manufacture drugs in large batches, while personalised medicine is nowhere near as advanced as you seem to think it is. As for wastage, do you have any statistics on that? As far as I'm aware that isn't much of an issue at all.
People like me who have friends in the USA know that they'll say things like "I can't afford to go to the hospital" or "I can't afford medicine". My friend in Georgia got stabbed and self-treated rather than spending thousands of dollars he doesn't have.
I wish the anarchists well for their endeavors.
As for the medicine here, they don't make it themselves for others except for shows and stunts according to the article and authorities (but they probably do it in secret), they send instructions on how to do it and have 3d printed parts to help. IMO Considering that it's this or death for some people there's no choice but to support it until an alternative is possible. Failures on the part of capitalism are making this the best choice.
Homemade epipencils for $30 and labs made of mason jars today. We need to work on throwing out the REASON goldman-sachs doesn't prioritize creating HIV medication tomorrow.
Probably because they're a bank, not a pharmaceutical company.
ya because they had to slaughter hundreds of specially bred pigs to extract a few pints of it back in ye olde day. we got better at it, then moved to synthetic insulin which has gotten better itself to the point that almost nobody ever needs the animal derived stuff
I'd say that your view on Anarchism is somewhat flawed and is more so a misrepresentation of what it could be because of things like 70's punk rock fashion and shit. Anarchy isn't always total destruction or lawlessness, it's more so focused on reformation and communalism.
this is all the more reason why socialized medicine is needed in this fucking country. Medical synthesis idn't something to fuck around with and industry of scale really does make a difference in quality and quantity
I don't know why the quote fucked up there my bad
no they've been drawn with blood, its the idiots today demanding that governments lower barriers to drug trials and make things go quicker that are ignoring history and putting future generations at risk. these right to try people aren't concerned about the unpredictable side effects these experimental drugs have they want to circumvent the need to prove your drug actually works for selfish profit driven gains
Isn't that just Communism then? Also, "communalism" doesn't work when you have cities with tens of thousands of people. I'd say it starts to fall apart once you pass a couple hundred, because that's the point where you go beyond the human capacity for social interaction, which means after that you will have people that do not know each other in the same town. Communes like the ones desired work best when everyone knows everyone, and that is just impossible with the scale of society today.
the complaints i was thinking of was more justifications from pharmaceutical companies as to why medicine is so expensive, the study period of new medicine being a quite expensive process.
centralization works, no doubt. it has and will continue to. i'm just injecting my own politics into it, more a utopic idea than one that is necessarily the most efficient financially. large-scale production, while cheaper, is far more likely to produce wasted product than small-scale production. about personalized medicines, i'm thinking long term potential as opposed to anything that is possible now.
about the wastage, there is this report
https://calpsc.org/mobius/cpsc-content/uploads/2015/08/Study-Taking-Stock-of-Medication-Wastage-Unused-Medicines-in-US-Households-2015.pdf
it estimates 2 in 3 dispensed medications go unused, however the issue is on the patient side, which wouldn't be solved by decentralized medicine production unless you were literally printing the pills out in your home. i personally have concerns about drugs entering into the water supply as we cannot predict what long-term effects constant low-level exposure to many drugs might have on our own systems.
i don't even care for anarchism and i know it's not nearly as simple as that. it's principally about deconstruction of hierarchy, by that metric anything from Mad Max to libertarian socialism to idyllic communism can be framed as anarchist.
not to say that most internet anarchists necessarily know this, but still
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