BioTerrorism Will Save Your Life with the 4 Thieves Vinegar Collective [video]
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I have some online friends who met through a forum for their rare condition. The forum they’re in had a splinter group dedicated to getting companies in China to synthesize experimental drugs for them that they couldn’t secure through normal channels, either because they hadn’t been approved yet or because they were expensive and off-label so nobody would even prescribe them.
Even contracting with professional chemical synthesis operations in foreign countries turned out to be more difficult than they imagined. Several companies would take their deposit, then refund part of it after several months because they could never get the synthesis to work properly. They received one batch that tested as being so impure that it was useless.
Projects like this convince people that all drugs are actually really easy to make, when in reality this project has carefully selected the most simple examples to make that misleading point.
However, I think everyone should be in charge of their own decisions, including taking not approved drugs, without being considered criminals or similar, under their strict own responsibility.
Depends on the state, but unscheduled drugs don't typically have possession laws. However, if you use an illegal method to acquire them, and in some case all realistic methods are illegal, you can get in trouble for that.
What should not be legal is fooling someone into taking something without knowing its consequences for the potential harm produced.
The rest should be ok.
It is impossible to fix.
Also, note thst even with regulations and, more important, INSIDE regulated areas, these things already happen.
I think there is a case to discuss what constitutes harm, but pretending that regulated means "harmless and ok" and not regulated "evil and dangerous" is a bad mindset and the one that is dragging us to a false sense of security via hyper regulation. Not always, of course, but in many cases it is just a false sense of it.
Agreed, that was sadly part of my point. They never end but not having them also doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. Some folks will want more, some won’t, at any balancing point.
Can you quote that part?
For the last thirty or so years ccc has mainly been a place for people to lie or exaggerate on stage in order to promote their security consulting firm or other freelance project.
So this is to be expected.
If replication in psychology is a crisis, the replication of results from hacker conference talks is an extinction-level apocalypse.
SO you get a nightclub environment like a stage.. let them do it, obviously useful things come out sometimes.
Before the 2017 “general ban” on psychoactive substances in the UK there was a thriving industry where “entrepreneurs” with the contacts for such labs would hire chemists to find them a new candidate analogue/derivative of say, a stimulant or hallucinogen or whatever, knock together a synthesis route, see if it works, and then have it manufactured in bulk for resale to head shops.
A small number of people got incredibly rich off this, some got busted when their product got banned and they didn’t dump the stock fast enough, but most made fucking phenomenal amounts of money.
The same “trade” carries on in some other European countries to this day, with “new” LSD derivatives cropping up every few months when one is invariably banned.
I vaguely recall there was even a few articles about this whole thing back in the day by some journalists, maybe at Vice or something? They had an interview with one of the chemists.
Perhaps NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/world/asia/in-china-illeg... (In China, Illegal Drugs Are Sold Online in an Unbridled Market, 2015)
AFAIU those were all made by Lizard Labs
Well "good ol" as in cheap easy access to tons of novel drugs. Which actually made life kind of a living nightmare.
It can't do everything, but those cherry-picked examples are still pretty dramatic. Saving $80k to cure your Hep.C is pretty practical. Getting an abortion while living under increasingly emboldened christofascists is pretty practical. Managing your own transgender HRT is pretty practical. Lets not perfect be the enemy of good, it's a pretty solid start.
That's neither cherry picking nor misleading.
Specifically, this is one stupid question and one irrelevant question. Why do you ask either the stupid question or the irrelevant question?
The stupid question is stupid in the same way as: "What color was George Washington's white horse?"
The entire presentation is nothing but a continuous stream of synopsys' of proofs of concepts. The answer to the question is nothing other than a verbatim transcript of the video.
Irrelevant question: My knowledge of a topic has no bearing on the validity of some presentation on that topic, unless I happen to be challenging or supporting the content of the presentation. It doesn't matter what I believed or knew before or after ingesting the presentation.
It's not merely showing that already known basic chemistry works as we already knew it worked.
It's almost like but again not merely showing that you can make your own cottage cheese at home instead of buying it as a commercially made product.
Countless medecines, and their delivery mechanisms, exist that could be produced in a more diy way, but most people don't know it, because of basically PR driven by the people who make money from medications and health care in general. That PR encompassing both ordinary direct messaging to the population and doctors, and lobbying for regulation and direct influence over regulating bodies and standards bodies by being members themselves, etc. The true issues of quality control and safety etc have been grossly over-used to justify removing options and control from end users.
I did not know that you could make your own epi pen. That is the kind of thing that everyone should know. I don't mean that everyone should know how to do it, I mean everyone should know it's possible and always there as an option the same way everyone knows you could make your own cheese.
That is one example that answers both questions. It proved the concept that such a thing is possible, and I myself also happened not to know it before watching the video.
I don't think it is invalid or not a proof of concept even if there already exists people with the right knowledge such that they consider the contents of an epi pen "basic chemistry".
It is still a revelating proof of concept that one can produce one's own epi-pen, and that the only thing preventing countless people from being able to take advantage of such a huge practicality, is a combination of various forms of artificial barriers that should all be insubstantial, but in the end they do end up acheiving the result that the epi-pen producer wants. No one makes their own epi-pens nor produces them in a cheap generic form (in the US).
That particular example isn't even new. When I google "make your own epi-pen" I see it comes from 2016. That does not mean it's not a proof of concept, it just demonstrates how those insubstantial barriers never the less worked. Not just because I personally did not know about this public thing that was there to be googled since 2016, but because in fact all the people who pay US health care rate for epi-pens unwillingly.
I think it doesn't matter if a concept is new or already known to some. A video demonstrating that it's possible to start a fire without a match is still a proof of concept even if some humans have known how to do that for thousands of years.
Right. We all know the best chips in the world are made by local artisan silicon-etchers. None of that TSMC pasteurized crap. You simply can't beat a 1nm brush and a steady hand. We all know this industrial revolution thing was a mistake.
Good faith reading of his argument would be that a custom, artisan crafted hammer is better than a factory made one. I can’t say if that is true or not but using chips as an example- probably the most complex man made thing- is bad faith argumentation
So yea human biology is as complex if not more complex I agree - creating medicine after a proven recipe is not.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-high-school-student-whos-build...
As your “creating medicine after a proven recipe” remark, that is not how things work. The way it usually works is that you study organic chemistry in college and then you work out a recipe yourself based on the chemical formula. You do not follow a recipe from someone else because recipes are often trade secrets. At least, that is what I took away from studying organic chemistry in college. Well, that and a remark by the professor that those making illicit drugs take that course before getting started.
In the context of access to cheap mass production, it would of course be silly to use the DIY product of that professionally.
In the context of "having zero access" to the technology, then the hand-produced products can be better than nothing, especially if the "no access" alternative is heinous or deadly in its own right.
It's kind of a micro-scale version of the larger discussion, perhaps?
On other topics, the cognition flips.
This is the nature of evolved, culturally conditioned consciousness (one of the things most HN'ers like talking about from an abstract perspective, but really don't like talking about at the object level during discussions of certain controversial ideas, when heuristics have taken control of the mind).
For fun: observe the nature of comments in this thread from a meta perspective of a curious alien observer.
it's important to get the chemistry right, but if you know the failure modes, it's far less of a black box and thus less scary.
A chemist broke this rule on YouTube by turning styrofoam into cinnamon candy that he ate himself, but he went through an extreme amount of effort to make it safe:
I think this phenomenon itself is very interesting and a huge deal (cognitive ability is what makes us the most dominant species, and is required just to maintain living standards), but also the secondary effect is interesting: the mind does not allow focus to be placed on it.
If you ask me, it is about as close to magic as you can get.
Artisan made tools compared to high end tools from a factory are more like a mechanical watch compared to an electronic one. It might be a cool mechanism and a more unique statement piece than an Apple Watch, but it sure won’t keep better time.
I don’t get why that is so controversial. Microchips are definitely not what I have in mind when I talk about a “tool” at all.
You say that this is a good enough example to completely refute the OPs point which I disagree with.
I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D, not manufacture. The cost of manufacture probably varies wildly (with the most expensive being bespoke treatments), but as the talk shows, there have been many examples where a (relatively) simple-to-manufacture drug is kept from those who need it due to prices that do not reflect the cost of manufacture.
Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.
Ever watch a non-chef bake a cake? If you have, that experience should give you great concern about people playing with drug recipes.
In addition, most drugs do not have a "nice" synthesis that doesn't leave a whole bunch of glop in the afterproducts. Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time.
The girl who needs mifepristone will not be an organic chemist. The trans-person who needs their hormones will not be an organic chemist. etc.
What part of: "Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time." did you miss?
We know what happens when drugs are made illegal--they wind up adulterated with god knows what--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
The "solution" is making sure that these drugs are legal and available. The solution is social and political--we need people to put in as much effort into the politics as they do into dubious "tech" solutions.
If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMaTrgUKC1w
He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.
Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.
Not just its R&D, but also the R&D of the 10 other drugs which looked promising, had a lot of money invested in them, but didn't end up working out in the end.
You could very easily pass a law invalidating all drug patents, and making generics for any drug easily available. This would make all drug prices go down drastically. It would definitely work, there's no question about it. The anti-capitalists are very much right about this.
What they're missing, though, is that this law would completely remove the incentive to make any new drugs. The progress of medicine would instantly slow down to a halt. All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.
Unless there's government funding.
Also consider that for both patents and government funding, there are other jurisdictions which won't do what your government does, so there's a Nash equilibrium problem where every country has people who want to defect (delete patents) to get free stuff whose research was paid for by the profit margin in the jurisdiction which keeps the patents.
> We all know that custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique tools are always better than something factory made.
This is wrong and he debunked it.
It's pretty trivial to generate a long list of technologies which are deemed "better" only because they are built by a large commercial enterprise.
For a few years there was a shortage of modafinil so I looked into making it myself. It’s not too hard, totally doable. As technology improves it’ll get even easier. Especially going from a low yield batch chemistry to a higher yield lab on a chip continuous chemistry. For more complex stuff there are micro-bioreactors to use recombinant DNA. It’s pretty cost effective to send off samples for analysis. I’m not confident enough to use any of my own synthesized meds, at this stage it’s just a hobby.
Procuring a custom batch of meds from Asia can be as cheep as $10K so patient groups sometimes organize group buys. Because the turnaround is so quick and there are plenty of volunteers the patient groups can get results much faster than the medical researchers.
(I put my email in my bio, I might have some useful stuff too)
:)
I had really high hopes for modafinil in treating my long-life fatigue issues as well as helping with my severe ADHD since I can't tolerate or access traditional stimulant medication for it rignt now. It was amazing for a week or so but quickly stopped having an effect unless I took 400mg a day, and the side effects of that dose were also not tolerable for me.
Low Dose Naltrexone works differently to Naltrexone in that the temporary block of the opioid receptor causes a paradoxical natural overreaction to the absence.
The mechanism of action is very complex but it appears that the inflammation -> neurotransmitter dysfunction (e.g. dopamine dysregulation)-> immune system dysfunction -> inflammation cycle creates a bit of a trap that people can get stuck in. Taking enough of the right meds on this cycle does appear to help people break out of that trap.
Phage are interesting, but they're ignored because they're worse than antibiotics by nearly every measure. They're _very_ narrow spectrum. They're immunogenic. Phage have found ex vivo applications, such as treating meat to prevent listeria.
Source: worked in an evolutionary bio lab for two years culturing and cloning phage.
I have seen this sentiment expressed, but I have yet to see any real evidence for it. A factory can ensure precision and consistency at a level that those hand crafting things never could. For all of the things listed, I would rather have factory made versions since I know they are likely made precisely to a specification and deviations from that specification likely make things worse, rather than better.
If that claim about hand made items being better were true, there would be a market for hand made CPUs, yet there is none, since hand made objects can not reach that level of precision. That is a major reason why society transitioned to factories for production in the first place.
Sure the factory guitar may sound "perfect", but the only guitar that sounds like this handmade guitar is this handmade guitar.
I consider such items to be worse and not just because they are objectively worse. Items break and are lost. When you become emotionally attached to an object such as a unique imperfect guitar, you are guaranteed to have sorrow when it is lost (e.g. in a fire).
In any case, the original premise was that such items are better and thus hand made medicine is better too. However, you do not want variations in medicine. During the pandemic, my doctor had a suspicion that the dosages of certain drugs had been lowered by the manufacturers versus what was on the label. That posed a problem for him because he could not properly treat patients if he had no clue what was actually in the pills filling his prescriptions. His suspicion had stemmed from seeing a trend among his patients where the efficacy was dropping in a way consistent with the dosages being lowered, although he was not sure by how much. If he had tried to compensate by prescribing larger dosages, when the manufacturers began to get things right again, his patients would have been taking overdoses. His solution was to switch them to alternative drugs and hope that the manufacturers of those drugs were producing pills that matched their labels. This is why precision is very important when it comes to medicine and the last thing anyone needs are imperfections in drug manufacturing.
Life is loss. You can’t have sorrow without having experienced joy. Sorrow passes.
There is something attractive about a new set of work gloves. They are fresh, clean, almost begging you to use them in a project.
There is something attractive about a set of work gloves that have curled to the shape of your hands and have been burnished by sap and sawdusts and oils: come on old friend, let's remake our previous magic.
There's something nice about a fleecy throw, but they are not as cozy as the quilts my wife made for my daughter, but defining that coziness will remain out of reach as far as my words go.
No one can be correct, here. It's just what appeals more or less to you.
https://www.1factory.com/quality-academy/forgotten-lessons.h...
Ford had transmissions produced in both the US and Japan, yet the Japanese made transmissions had 1/4 the repair frequency. Their engineers disassembled them to discover why. It turned out that they were both within spec, but the Japanese transmissions had been manufactured to tighter tolerances and had targeted ranges in the specification that resulted in a better fit and superior performance.
In this case, the factory had taken it upon itself to improve the design within the tolerances that Ford had specified. Tighter tolerances usually cost more, although economics of scale can bring the price down. Presumably that happened in the case of the Japanese factory. Otherwise, they would not have been able to produce the transmissions at the prices Ford paid them.
Idk, in the example "a built racecar engine" one could imagine that instead of running CNC machines all day long to make pistons, replacing tools for wear periodically, a machinist could take a brand new end mill, make some initial test cuts and validate the dimensions, then make the final part and look it all over with the CMM or other tools. You could, by paying extra attention to each part, make a more precise part than something being made on an assembly line where things are not double checked quite so meticulously, for basic efficiency reasons.
Like I assume that by the same definition of "hand made" as the racecar engine, we would consider NASA rovers to be hand made. And they are made to a very high precision. We could consider whether SpaceX Engines have ever been "hand made" and how the quality of those relates to production engines (tho in this case, production engines must have rigorous validation of basically every component I would imagine, so the factory perhaps meets or could even exceed hand production runs in quality).
But I would not say it needs to be a hard and fast rule.
> The 2JZ-GTE, which sits in the heart of the Supra, is one of the best inline-six out of Japan and easily tunable to 500+ Hp on stock internals.
Are any of these engines used in NASCAR, F1 or any professional autosports? If not, they are not “racing engines”.
By the way, for very low volume parts, it would make sense to make them by hand, so just because Ford lists them does not mean that they are made on an factory assembly line. That is if they are actual engines used in professional autosports. If they are hot rod engines, a factory production line would make sense since those have a bigger market.
It also costs more to handmake parts with tight tolerances than to handmake them with loose tolerances. So from a certain point of view tolerances are all about your budget.
Here's the crucial part, though. You can get any given tolerance level more cheaply by handmaking things at low volumes, and more cheaply through mass production at high volumes.
But let's talk about consistency. In today's statistical process control regimes, it's common for mass-produced parts to hit "six sigma": the point where the tolerances they're manufactured to are six standard deviations out from the process mean, so the normal variation in the process will only produce out-of-tolerance parts in one of a billion cases (1 - pnorm(6) in R). In practice, uncharacterized sources of variation that don't follow the normal distribution tend to overwhelm that, but it's still common to have a better than 99% chance that the part the manufacturer sends you will meet its specifications.
By contrast, when you contract with someone to make the first instance of something, if it's a very reputable maker, you might get 95%. The other 5% includes things like misunderstandings of the specs, unforeseen accidents, and undetected sources of deviation. In complex fields like architecture and software your chances of getting what you ordered are more like 0%.
Isn't a CPU kind of one of the most complex thing humanity has ever created in hardware terms? Like the scales involved are so different, compared to the examples of a guitar, chisel or knife. It requires so tiny tolerances and measurements, that I guess we're past it's even possible to "make a CPU by hand" that comes close to our current CPUs. Sure, you can always use old CPU designs from back in the day, but a knife today can be the same as it was 2000 years ago, it just has to be sharp and comfortable, so really hard to compare.
> I have seen this sentiment expressed, but I have yet to see any real evidence for it.
Have you gone searching for evidence? The examples being guitars, chisels, knifes, suit and shoes, sounds simple to search how the top-of-the-line stuff is made. I'd bet on that high quality things from those categories are in fact typically hand-made.
I guess that settles that, then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42544305
Anyway, why waste my time doing further research just because a random guy who convinced himself arguably inferior hand made goods are superior to factory made goods did not like hearing that? The opportunity cost is not worthwhile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Finally, “if you have not done enough research to agree with me, you have not done enough research” is a fallacious line of thought, since it excludes the possibility you are wrong. Coincidentally, I have an interest in this particular line of research since it is hard for me to find shoes that fit. That is why I have several pairs of the same exact shoe in my closet in the first place. In any case, I have done enough research to be comfortable. The fact that the results do not align with your beliefs is your problem.
For these items in particular, there is generally no extant factory automation that will get you a better result than a human craftsman. You'd be a fool to pick extant mass produced alternatives, all else being equal.
A CPU is a pretty poor analogy here, since it's not only precision that makes handmade examples of the above items superior, but it's essentially the only thing that matters for a CPU (or something like an iPhone, etc). You likely could design a superior factory for many of those items, taking into account materials variance, bespoke details for individual customers, etc., but it would not be economical in the markets where these items are sold.
edit: I also think these items are a bad analogy for medicine, where precision is paramount. So I probably agree with you there.
>> For all of the things listed, I would rather have factory made versions.
I think people believe this who haven't ever experienced truly custom hand-made things. The process of creating an actual "custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique" shoe will involve first creating a custom "last" - a wooden mold to build the shoe around.
This last isn't literally a mold of your foot, it is a custom-sculpted shape that is specific to both your foot and the particular shoe style. The shoemaker will keep all of their customer's lasts in a large library, so once your last is customized properly for you (in-person), you don't have to return to order more of that type of shoe - you can place future orders in different colors/materials and the shoe will be created around that same wooden last, ensuring a very specific fit that is most comfortable for you.
A factory cannot do this.
The point of hand-made things is customization that goes far beyond what a factory could ever do. If you're buying hand-made things that aren't truly customized for you, then you're largely missing the point.
If he had never seen such high quality shoes, I certainly do not expect him to be able to produce equal quality shoes even if he is able to make a better fit. However, they make enough sizes of shoes that you can approximate the right fit and actually getting the right fit is not significantly different. I have wide feet, which makes getting shoes that fit well difficult since the wide variety is not often shipped to stores and likely has limited production. That is why I had so many duplicates of the same shoe in my closet in the first place. Having found shoes that fit, I do not feel any need for a custom fit.
That said, a custom fit is a very different thing than a claim of being intrinsically better. If we go by what my father claimed the cobbler in China said, the factory made shoes are the better ones (or at least the Rockport ones I wear are).
This boils down to the definition of what "better" means, and for items like those listed that's actually quite easy! "Better" means "the way I want it". Customized to my individual needs. Factory produced can never give you that.
If I want a Gyuto style knife with an octagonal handle made from carbon fibre and blade in CPM-10V alloy, I'm not going to find it at Ikea.
If I want a suit or a leather boot that fits my particular body perfectly, it needs to be custom made.
If I want a built K20 turbo engine, it will need to be very different if it goes in a circuit racing car or a time attack car, and both need to be very different from the factory engine.
The factory needs to optimize for the average person. It needs to satisfy regulators, beancounters, shareholders. The artisan does not.
Also, custom PCB's are getting easier and easier, it seems like there's a ton of YouTube videos sponsored by and about doing custom PCB's for projects in 2024. Heck, I have an Air gradient in my house, and while it's not a custom CPU, it is a custom, relatively low volume PCB designed by (as far as I can tell) a single person, almost like an artist...
I'm not trying to add a lot to the conversation, just suggest that even chips are moving towards customisation and artisanship.
That said, I think you have a good perspective and it was refreshing to read.
"""DIY Synthesis"""
At DEF CON 32, Mixæl Swan Laufer, a representative of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, presented a talk titled "Eradicating Hepatitis C with BioTerrorism." The presentation argued that advancements in open-source tools and chemistry enable individuals to synthesize certain medications, such as Sovaldi, at home, potentially bypassing high pharmaceutical costs.
During the talk, Laufer demonstrated tools and techniques used by the collective to synthesize pharmaceuticals, showcasing examples of the medications created. To illustrate the efficacy and accessibility of the process, he consumed a dose of Sovaldi onstage, despite not having Hepatitis C, as a symbolic gesture of the drug's claimed safety."""
Your commit is dangerous to Wikipedia, therefore seen as "borderline vandalism". I'm sure the mod didn't want to go into greater detail than that because the reasoning is not fun for anybody.
Safety first, unfortunately.
"It's like saying that you're going to make your own aluminum foil."
For medications (and anything where artificial scarcity is created with IP), it can be cheaper to create the product at home instead of buying it. If homemade quality is 'good enough', that's a reasonable option.
For comparison, I make my own sauerkraut. The stuff at Walmart is fine, but it's cheaper and higher quality to make at home.
The same logic applies to lots of software.
- Pregnant women who need abortion medication
- Trans people who need hormones
With finasteride and puberty blockers/HRT being criminalized, a lot of people in the above categories are turning to black market / DIY solutions.
Testosterone is a controlled substance but estrogen isn't.
Gotta love the USA!
As a cis man, I sure am happy nobody forced me to go through a female puberty.
It is impossible for anyone to undergo the puberty of the opposite sex because, obviously, they are not of that sex.
As you are male, there is no method by which you could have gone through female puberty. So your hypothetical of this being forced upon you is nonsense.
You are male. If you took estrogen - either now, or as a child - you would not begin to menstruate, you would not experience changes to the vaginal surface, you would not start to ovulate, and so on. Female puberty is a developmental process that only applies to those who are female.
I guess it is very hard to refute 4th grade biology.
One man's "Depression" is another man's "normal brain function; life just gets hard sometimes and that's natural." Explaining to the latter person how dehabilitating the experience is doesn't matter because one person cares about subjective inner experience and the other cares about mechanistic physiology.
Similarly, one person's puberty can be extremely traumatic. People who aren't trans wouldn't understand.
What would you call it if your parents denied you healthcare as a child, leading to permanent disfigurement? I call it mutilation.
It used to be common to get serious infections at a young age. But today if your parents refused to provide you healthcare (vaccinations, in this case), and you caught polio which lead to osteoporosis preventing you from ever walking normally again; would you also say that wasn't damage or mutilation? I mean, it was the natural process of development through which a child matures, at least until we developed a vaccine.
It used to be there wasn't much we could do for trans people, just like polio. But now we have medications that can prevent the suffering the conditions lead to, and not using them is evil.
> Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state. Taking those rights back for yourself is then labeled "BioTerrorism". So be it. Let's learn how.
This is, in most country, false. You can absolutely decide on your own to mix up some chemical and then take it (you might just be held accountable for the result, i.e, not coverage from your health insurance). There is some exception related to the consumption of narcotics, but, what most law, not government (its an important distinction in a democracy), make illegal is the distribution (and the intent of) of drugs without the proper licence. And there is very, very good reasons for it. Drugs are no joke. Some ingredients needs to be very precisely dosed, at very low concentration, requiring special tooling and precaution, or you might reach a toxic dosage very, very quickly and kill someone (or permanently damage some organs). Then, there is the issue of quack doctor and quack medicine. While the current system is far from perfect (see: the opioid crisis in the US), it still give legal repercussion for people who sale snake oil, potentialy dangerous ones, and who prey on already often desperate victim.
The other thing is, the law also prevent buying some chemical without the proper licence. And again, there is usually good reasons for it. Either because they make it easy to synthetise drugs that society has judged detrimental (again, narcotics like meth, heroin, ...), or because they make explosives (wasn't it sulfuric acid that could turn a lot of stuff into energetics ?).
And for the most part, theses laws where written in blood. We can debate the specifics of their implementations (the war on drugs, the free access to birth control, how to allow for experimentation, ...), but the overall spirit of those laws is, I believe, sadly very needed in our current world.
Obviously there is also the patent issue, but it's a whole lot of debate in itself.
In a healthier society there'd be a smooth gradient between the layman and the professional such that B.S. prohibitions would be identified and removed by informed subsets of the population. But instead we have this very crisp boundary between the in-the-know and the clueless, and to be in-the-know is so expensive that one can't afford to be in-the-know while also not being on somebody's payroll--those tend to be the same somebody's who have a monopoly to protect, so the clueless stay clueless and the capable stay under control.
There's a lot of criticism in adjacent threads for these guys having cherry-picked the easy examples, but given the circumstances I think that that's precisely what we ought to be doing: Identify the cases where taking control of your drugs is relatively easy, teach people to do it, and level up gradually until that set of cases starts growing.
We may never get to the point where we're making everything at home, but if we don't at least take a shot at the easy ones then we'll never know where the reasonable equilibrium point lies (i.e. the point beyond which you should leave it to a corporation). As it stands we're letting that point be decided by people who have a conflict of interest in doing so.
I know people who cook their own medicine, but they are trained as chemists or microbiologists and have access to lab facilities. If Joe Sixpack stated doing his own, it'd look like so: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/americas/mexican-ca...
We know that niche stuff like Daraprim or trientine is easy to produce because it used to be cheap before the financializers got there. I'm not yet convinced that the solution is to cook your own, one should lean on the government to have a national facility.
There are many countries - for example Cuba - that can’t rely on these systems - they need to cook their own.
Is your proposal to rely on the government really realistic in those scenarios?
Those days are gone, like the old web. Not sure, if the DIY movement can put enough pressure on the drug cartel to drop prices. Then again, university librarians had been complaining about Elsevier since the 1990's, but nothing got done until Sci-Hub appeared. That's the hammer argument against Crito.
I hate being cynical about something like this. I want there to be affordable health solutions for people. But this comes off so naive and self-aggrandizing that it makes me want to actually get out of tech and into a field where people are more grounded. Something with fewer religious fanatics, God complexes, and delusions of grandeur.
I've been having this thought a lot lately. Do you have any thoughts about which field you might transition to, if you did this?
I've been considering bioinformatics, so far the classes have been pretty fun, but I haven't yet gotten close enough to the day-to-day work to know if it's any less toxic or just toxic in new and unpleasant ways.
Then do it- that's the point of the art piece, in a very literal way. Everybody fixates on the aesthetics around this kind of thing, but if it moves you to action than it's working.
So let it work, learn what you need to learn to help folks in the ways that you feel this project fails.
And then you won't have the cynical feeling that you don't like.
I'd be all over home production or brew-kits for users or compounding pharmacists to save lives or quality of life. But damn, the more complex synthesis pathways have potential for insanely serious 'bugs', and the consequences aren't just a software crash, they can be life-altering or life-ending. With fully informed consent, still works for me.
https://fourthievesvinegar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/to...
Individually importing drugs (plus tariffs) from the other coin of the planet is an unnecessarily complicated way to hack this problem.
>"Our ultimate hope is to get to a point where we're no longer necessary because the notion of DIY medicine, no matter anybody's opinion of it is common enough that if it comes up in conversation, someone can say 'Oh I'm just going to 3D print a replacement'".
>No, no, that is not going to be happening any time soon, or (frankly) at all. I could go one for another couple of thousand words about why that is, about solvents, waste disposal, availability of starting materials, purification, analytical data, formulations, particle size, excipients, and plenty of other topics that complicate that vision enormously. But really, why bother? The people who believe this stuff when they hear it will not be persuaded, because I'm obviously a Big Pharma Shill. Perhaps it will be worthwhile to just note that anyone who actually knows about drug synthesis and manufacture just rolls their eyes when this sort of thing comes up, rather than shaking with fear that their livelihood is under attack. It's like saying that you're going to make your own aluminum foil.
>But I'm sure that no matter what, Four Thieves will continue to make a big noise at biohacker events and the like, giving exciting presentations about how they're changing the world. But it's all. . .a joke. A show. Performance art. A cartoon. I hope they're enjoying themselves.
This reminds me very much of the comments on HN when Dropbox first launched, swearing that nobody would ever need it because everyone can just do what they’ve already always done.
The problem is getting the drugs you need is not easy to do, and while 4 thieves isn’t “easy” yet, it actually is way easier than arguing with insurance, needing a PA, getting a letter of medical necessity, only to still get rejected, and then having to argue with your state insurance board through an IMR.
That’s what I meant. All it takes is one or a few people to start doing this for friends, and it begins to spread.
And that says nothing of when Shkreli or anyone else jacks up the price of an important life-saving medication simply because, well, they can.
Has this in fact happened?
If the drugs are "actually" cheap and easy to make, I suggest importing them from India. If they aren't "actually" easy to make, you aren't going to successfully make them.
That said, one wishes that you hadn't dragged abortion in, they use it to derail the discussion around universal medical care. Hey, you can't afford the dentist, but at least we fight for abortion.
That suggested, I looked at the table and could not plainly see the problem. Would imagine that time series presented like with an analog of Tim Morgan's Energy cost of Energy for energy markets might help..
hacking is a way to provide dignity to people in how they relate to systems. be warey of the ones who object to that.
It’s even come up regularly on YouTube channels like NileRed/NileBlue - he has a couple of videos on processing wastes/cleanup work done after a reaction.
> The people who believe this stuff when they hear it will not be persuaded, because I'm obviously a Big Pharma Shill.
Pre-empting any counterpoint to his arguments by saying they'll unfairly dismiss him. A rather smug approach to the "little guy", but possibly warranted. But his previous post on the subject has this gem:
> What I'm getting at is that people like Four Thieves Vinegar are not developing drugs. They're trying to find cheap, easily replicable ways to make and distribute drugs that other people have already spent the time and money to develop. If the capitalists of the world hadn't ponied up the at-risk funding to find those drugs in the first place, there would be nothing for anarcho-hacker pharma collectives to do. Speaking for the Big Evil Pharma Industry, if I may, you Vinegar Thieves are living in our basement and subsisting on what we provide.
First of all: we've been hearing for over century the line about superhero-capitalist John Galts deserving to billionaires because they were the ones who "ponied up the at-risk funding", and it's extremely shaky, if not outright bullshit. Especially in the pharma industry, where X% of "discoveries" come straight from government funding, not private capital (with X being an endlessly argued number, but almost certainly above 50). Secondly: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective don't appear to be claiming any discoveries, so what exactly is he arguing here? Couldn't he levy the same complaint against every generic drug manufacturer, that they're "living in the basement" of the Big Smart Important Guys like him? These statements are pretty close to what you'd expect from a "Big Pharma Shill" that he's pre-emptively trying to immunize himself from being accused of.
There is a big sample bias here. The community of hackers is generally intelligent and curious. The laws in place were not necessarily made with them in mind, but for people who will take homeopathic remedies, use energy crystals.
Maybe if you're smart enough to avoid detection and navigate the legal hurdles, that is the acid test (heh) for the competences and diligence these things require...
It's not? Elsevier finally relented when universities could finally cancel their subscriptions because librarians could direct people to Sci-Hub.
Also, purposely making your website look less "well crafted" strikes me as quite cynical (and almost certainly counterproductive).
> The actual aim seems closer to marketing or perhaps influencing public discourse on the subject
A worthy aim, no?
... How much do giant drug corps spend on marketing? Last I remember, it was more than they spend on drug development; in the tens of billions of dollars annually. In this context, quibbling that a website seems too nice seems remarkably misguided.
Finally, considering how much effort has been put into helping people actually make these things - far more than anyone else! - I think trying to redefine their aim to be just marketing is deeply unfair.
Is this how you think about everything? Do you go to a restaurant with nice chairs and think, "The food here must suck, they spend too much money on the furniture"?