Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

The whole show feels like the financial literacy courses that are being offered by credit card companies. The system is stacked against the individual, we need to keep the notion of "personal responsibility" alive. Do we want this future: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/americas/mexican-ca...

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.

I’m not an US citizen but it seems that people in the US just die because they don’t get the medicine they need to juice up profits. I’m sure the coming gov won’t improve that. In that situation I can empathise with people who “cook their own”. I am sure you would do the same if the alternative is agonising slow death.

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?

It takes a diversity of tactics to overcome an adversary as entrenched as the pharmaceutical industry. I don't believe in their wild "one day everyone will manufacture their own medication" BS, but it's valuable to keep this knowledge in the public consciousness. If for no other reason to remind us that Big Pharma is gouging patients for life-saving drugs that are cheap and simple to manufacture.

With certain niche medications like trientine it used to be a small manufacturer, the scale of a man with a garage, who had the FDA registration and sold the stuff for a price that allowed him to make a living. That worked fine, until investment banking got there, and raised the price to whatever the market would bear.

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.

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