I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typically with no ability to know if they did anything at all), many of whom, after a few years, realize that what they are doing is naive, and that there was actually a reason for the entire establishment around pharma.
The corporation then benefits from regulatory capture, and insanely high regulatory barriers to lock away less capitalized competitors from introducing their own unique drugs. Those who can afford the insane regulatory costs then can squeeze consumers dry.
Open up a maximally free market for pharmaceuticals and watch these snakes die. If I want to GC/MS some shit I bought out of some guys basement to check purity myself then let me.
Tax base funds the work, donor base collects the rewards.
Academia gets to keep rewards; universities patent discoveries and license the technology to industry. This made $$$ for Stanford and UC (billions of dollars).
I am sympathetic to the idea that regular joe of US doesn't get enough benefit for their tax payments but actually I think if you look at all the benefits americans get indirectly from living here, it's hard to say for certain that individuals aren't recompensed properly. And, I suppose, if they wanted, many people can buy stock in pharma and enjoy the profits themselves.
You think academia know how to optimize structure? Bulk manufacturer? Organize clinical trials across the globe? Check all the regulatory boxes?
I'm not completely arguing with the idea that pharma overprices drugs, but to me, that's a distinct problem from who pays for, and benefits from research and development.
You are free to make your own drugs and “GC/MS some shit”, though you’d just be smarter to buy it outside the US.
Fuck the thieving snakes claiming it is "their" work when an entirely different 3rd party with no prior contract with the pharma snakes uses their own reagents and chemicals and published or reverse engineered synthetic pathway to produce a substance.
"You are free to make your own drugs." I suppose you are, if you're willing to violate the CSA and FDA/DEA regulations, as my comment pertained to being able to buy drugs _someone else_ made in their basement (although I'd also like to include making your own as well).
This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&d and other costs justify the US prices for the same drugs that are sold profitably Yet way cheaper in other western markets.
As to why drugs are expensive in the US: because the market bears it. Demand is just elastic enough (or inelastic, I always get it backwards) in the US that providers slowly edge prices up. Sometimes they get it wrong for example aduhelm didn't sell so it had a huge price drop recently.
Regulatory compliance doesn't provide benefits to patients; it's a deadweight loss. As you are presumably aware, to a significant extent, the reason that regulatory compliance is so costly is that, being costly protects established drug companies from competition.
Quality control and initial R&D have nothing to do with why Epi Pens, insulin, or Daraprim are absurdly overpriced in the US. That's purely monopoly rent extraction.
Regulatory compliance, for example, with the FDA approval process, isn't a deadweight loss; it's a process that reduces the risk a dangerous drug will be given to the public. It's mostly costly due to incompetence and bureaucracy, not because pharma is evilly plotting to continue to be the only people who can get stuff through the FDA.
If somebody comes up with magical ways to reduce the costs of R&D and QC in pharma, I'm all for it. Just be aware: I've worked around pharma for decades and it will only get more expensive to do any of this. Nobody is going to come in and magically disrupt the business with a new technology pharma didn't think of yet.
People don't have to be evilly plotting when their incentives are set up to empower only people who do evil things. Don't forget that, in the US, we're talking about the same regulatory regime that rejected magainin, hasn't brought a new class of antibiotics to market in half a century, has outlawed the flavored vape liquids that help people quit smoking, won't allow you to buy a blood sugar meter until after you have diabetes, prohibited covid testing at the beginning of the pandemic, delayed covid vaccination until five or six months after China was doing mass vaccination, and routinely cuts off opiate addicts cold turkey. It's a Kafkaesque farce, as you know very well, and quite possibly the primary cause of death in the US today.
I think this is almost possible for a large range of simple, small-molecule drugs.
For example, better quality insulin is far more expensive because there's tremendous capture not only in the insulin market but the bioreactors required to make the insulin from bacteria. The process isn't insanely complicated, chemistry-wise, but the fact that only a few can make it and its MUCH better means they can charge more.
Another example is one-off drugs for rare but potentially curable conditions. They are often so expensive that they're pulled from the market because 1% of 1% of the population needs them and you can't use that to drive revenue.
3D printing took off precisely because of the LACK of regulatory capture. Imagine you had an FDA synthesizer that could make something common and simple like blood pressure medication for fractional cents on the dollar. You wouldn't be able to find the plans for this like you could for a 3D printed gun, for example, because the technology requires actual expertise to use. So you'd likely be left buying it from some biotech firm who will happily charge a price equivalent to a lifetime supply of all the drugs it can produce. You once again reach the affordability problem. Not because the technology is that far out of reach or so esoteric, but to be able to even get the device into the people's homes who need it you would need to find centuries of deeply entrenched and well capitalized special interests. Pharma would rather you die from something preventable than leave a single penny uncollected. Normally this would be considered hyperbole but in this case it's absolutely, verifiably true.
You can be certain if any DIY "3d molecule printer" ever took off there would be heavily armed alphabet soup boys at the DEA ready to kill whoever to keep the interests of big pharma in power.
So why don't insurance companies contract an independent lab to make their own medicine instead of paying ridiculously high prices for out-of-patent medicine? Of course, it would be a proper lab, with certifications and quality control, not some guy's basement, so it would be expensive, but on the other hand, the alternative is also way too expensive.
Insurance companies are happy to be the buyer and seller as that is plenty profitable without the legal risk.
- the risks from whatever else the heroin is cut with (fentanyl?)
- the risk of getting HIV
- the risks of taking heroin in the first place
Are you really saying that the former is a crime against humanity and the latter isn't?
I wonder how far they can legally push the DIY kit. Can they ship you supplies with the kit? Can they ship you expresso-like packs for your DIY machine?
Luckily, I didn't go back to the stinkies - I never smoked again (I also quit vaping after a while, quitting vaping is not hard because it's not nearly as addictive as ciggies are).
It's obviously better to risk using DIY medicine than to die, and it sounds appealing—mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, saving lives with free medicine! But framing it this way significantly misrepresents the issue of for-profit medicine.
People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. They are selling their homes, emptying retirement accounts and their kids college funds, going into debt and going bankrupt to pay for life-saving medicine.
These guys have given people a new option. You don't have to go into debt—you could instead choose DIY medicines of dubious quality that could have costly medical consequences for you.
This isn't quite as appealing. It isn't some radical, utopian alternative. It's just how the system works today for poor people in so many areas of life: education, housing, food, medical care, etc. The rich can afford quality, while the poor have to make hard trade-offs and take risks to stretch their dollars.
No, people are definitely dying because they can't afford medicine. They're not taking things they need, they're cutting pills in half, they're diluting injections. When they finally die from some acute episode, what got them there is never recorded.
The amount of bullshit I have gone through to get albuterol inhalers (which cost $5 in civilized countries, but used to cost $20 in the US until a consortium of pharma lobbyists churned the patent and got the price up to $80.) I've met people in parking lots to buy out of date medicine in a crumpled brown paper bag. I guarantee that more than one person dies from this every single day, and none of them are recorded any differently than any other asthma death. Not being able to obtain this absurdly cheap to produce medicine that has been available for half a century has put me into intensive care for a week, causing years of medical debt when I was young. I wouldn't have been there if I hadn't been trying to manage without an inhaler.
Daraprim and emergency epinephrine seem like the same type of thing. To be honest, though, I prefer to Meet the Criminals Smuggling Their Own Medicine. For Albuterol, ordering inhalers from India was the real answer.
Why would a company lobby to outlaw its current product? Well, they had patents on "improved" CFC-free versions, allowing them to exclude new entrants from the market.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-...
”"It's crazy that I live in Canada, but now I'm looking at having to sell my house for coverage of my medication."
Earlier this week, McLaren walked to her local Shopper's Drug Mart and paid nearly $8,000 for a 21-day supply. On Tuesday she swallowed her first pill, worth $262.40 for just one day of treatment.”
It's similar to issues like homelessness: 0.15% of the population are on the street, but the number of people affected by housing costs is much larger.
Or police shootings of unarmed black men: 100-200 per year, which pales in comparison with millions of incarcerated black men.
We hear so much about these tiny problems is because political activists have chosen media-centric strategies to influence policy makers. The idea is to use outrage to get on the news, and then bring up the bigger issues. But in practice, policy makers just solve the outrageous problem: body cams for police; more shelters. Then the media goes away.
Also, medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
I can fairly confidently predict this will not happen like it did for software. Chemical analysis has been around a long time and remains difficult for experts to do accurately without context, let alone for a layman. Gas chromatography, for example, requires large and expensive machinery and some idea of what the substance is composed of in order to determine the concentration of analytes.
Reagent testing is cheap, simple, and straightforward, but it is generally only capable of detecting whether or not some class of substances are present above a particular concentration. You cannot use reagent testing to determine "how pure" a medicine is, let alone whether the impurities (which there will assuredly be) are potentially harmful.
As is currently the case for illicit drugs, I imagine there will be an ecosystem to verify that A) the active ingredient is actually present and B) some limited range of problem impurities are not present, but that is a much less stringent form of quality control than pharmaceutical companies perform.
Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid chromatography, XRF, XRD, and NMR, can be miniaturized and mass-produced. There hasn't been much pressure to do this because bio and chem labs don't care if their spectrophotometer costs US$0.12 or US$12000 or whether it weighs 100 mg or 100 kg; they need one to get their work done, they don't need it to be portable, and they aren't going to lose it because it stays in the lab. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Even Victorian-era-style reagent testing can be made quantitative in some cases!
Most major OSS projects are controlled by a few companies who pay developers to work on them. They're more like industry consortiums than DIY anarchist collectives.
The solution isn't to destroy capitalism or exclude industrial companies from participation. We tried that a century ago. It went badly, because, as it turns out, capitalism is better at limiting the damage done by ambitious psychopaths than the alternative systems are; if Beria had been born in Ohio maybe he would have ended up running a soap company or a division of GE instead of mass-murdering dissidents.
Similarly, the GPL (and, to a lesser extent, non-copyleft open-source licensing) reduces the damage selfish companies can do to software projects and the people and companies that depend on them.
We need to figure out how to do the same thing to drug companies and the FDA, because they are just killing far too many people and causing far too much needless suffering today.
Because, as a post below notes, this is a pure fantasy. At this point you're proposing actual magic.
>Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows
Your choice of operating system isn't going to severely harm or kill you. "Move fast and break things" is a problem when the "things" are people.
>medical consequences have to get pretty costly before they're more costly than selling your home and emptying your retirement account and your kids' college funds.
Welcome to the reality of healthcare in the US for the uninsured (and often times for the poorly-insured).
If it were me I'd just make it all in one go, hopefully enough to be set for life, huge pile of it whatever drug I need to stay alive. Create a homogeneous mixture, GC/MS the mixture for purity and then package it for long term storage.
if someone glad to try some secret drug, maybe they can killed by error one...
I don’t where you live. But in California there are clearly destitute people on the street in need of simple medical interventions like antibiotics.
For whatever reason* they aren’t able to get medical help — and I’m not just meaning people in mental crisis and drug addiction. There are seemingly “regular” people suffering from what should be 19th century style deaths.
* I’ve noticed that EMTs are very cynical about helping poor looking people. I’m sure the classism extends to getting care, even when hospitals are legally required to provide immediate help without taking finances in to account.
Source? According to the HHS via Washington Post[1], many doses of monoclonal antibodies have already been made, but only 20% of those distributed have been used, with 80% sitting on a shelf. The article suggests a few reasons for the lack of use, but it does not mention cost to make them.
I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess, should the circumstances require that. I know that no medical professional would help me do that, because they would immediately be disqualified. Instead they would have to strive officiously to prolong my life.
Nembutal is illegal to possess, at least it is here. That's not like the drugs this group are helping people to make, which are all legal to possess provided you have a prescription, or so the article says. There's no "therapeutic" use for Nembutal that can't be met by a safer drug.
As a result Nembutal is really difficult to source (also because it's part of the traditional cocktail used in US death-by-poisoning executions).
Wouldn't this inevitably leave a mess when your dead body bloats and eventually spills open the quickly decaying contents?
What’s the best way to fix this? Direct government funding? Indirect one via subsidising the drugs for those who need it? Im
But they claim their site has been under construction for about a year now.
I think it's important to note that this group is more about political activism and getting headlines than they are about actually producing and distributing the medication.
Regulatory capture.
And for medical conditions that don't yet have drugs developed: "Why can't I make a profit by investing some reasonable amount of money to develop a drug?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development puts the average cost in the billions of dollars. How much of that is due to intrinsic difficulty, and how much is artificially imposed?
Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
> Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
I don't think it's that easy. Even if you successfully synthesize the right chemical, you also have to get dosage and delivery right (consistently!).
From the OP:
> In response, Four Thieves published the instructions for a DIY epipen online that can be made for $30 in off-the-shelf parts and reloaded for $3.
If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it (e.g. mechanism fails, storage stability issues, dosage issues, etc.). Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem.
> Shkreli drove the price of the lifesaving HIV medicine Daraprim sells up to $750 per pill. So Four Thieves developed an open source portable chemistry lab that allows anyone to manufacture their own Daraprim for just 25 cents apiece.
The article calls Daraprim and "HIV medicine" throughout, but isn't that misleading? I thought it was an anti-parasitic (that may be used by HIV patients to treat secondary infections).
DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!)
See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.
Shkreli went to jail for securities fraud- not raising the price of a drug. I think Shkreli was a convenient scapegoat for the pharmaceutical industry though. All the time and energy people spent angry at Shkreli was time spent not directing their anger at the industry that allowed it.
It's clear that the vaccines don't confer total immunity. They do change the course of the infection if you contract it, though. As you'd expect: they induce your immune system to create antibodies.
Spend even a few minutes browsing stories from ICU nurses and you'll conclude that pretty much all their admissions are unvaccinated.
Vaccinated => get sick Unvaccinated => get very sick, maybe die
That seems like a great utility to me.
Sure, that's anecdata, but data doesn't convince people who call others "sheep"
Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life.
I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.
Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned on pandemic stress
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-...
with more expected to come:
"Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19.
He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early."
Pinning on pandemic stress means they couldn't pin it on covid - either it is non-infected people or timing isn't correlated enough. Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?