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 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 certainly is.
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.
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
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
Compounding pharmacies should not be subjected to patents. Then the costs are all local instead of tithes to the corporate clergy.
With the same risk to blindness as moonshine?
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.
You are correct. If I gave the impression that it is a safe endeavour, I am sorry. It is safe IF done correctly, but it can get explodey if you fuck up bad enough.
Do your research, keep it small scale and don’t sell.
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!
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.
Hail Four Thieves Vinegar Collective!
More DIY, right to repair, open source living.
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.
By far one of the most interesting articles I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, thanks for the link
You wouldn’t download a
carlife saving medicine!…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.
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.
Man, I would be so worried about impurities and side reactions. A good example is the recalls of drugs because of nitrosamine contamination. If stuff like this already happens to the experts.
And what is with the whole galenics side? How to make sure the absorption is about right…
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!
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.
