Synthesized. Not developed. Synthesizing medicines is easy. Developing them is extremely difficult.
That being said, they aren't running clinical trials or evaluating drug efficacy, which is another difficult part of drug development.
Movies are for fun & profit.
Medicine is for people's health / survival and profit.
You can live without the first but without the second you'll probably die soon and maybe painful as well (depending on the first fatal desease you contract).
If you want to help, they need someone to crack a rar file containing the Chematica data (which was acquired by Merck pharmaceuticals)
https://twitter.com/MichaelSLaufer/status/102263726560276889...
This was true years ago but not anymore. CVS sells a generic epipen two-pack for $109 [1]. Still not cheap, but let’s not pretend that these cost $300 and are not even available. I wanted to like this article but when I read this it made me think either reading journalist didn’t check his facts or is more invested in the narrative than reality.
1: https://www.cvs.com/content/epipen-alternative
Edit: I posted this even though I figured it would attract downvotes. I’m curious if downvoters think my claims are untrue or don’t like the way I’ve phrased my comment.
To me, an article I can’t trust is basically worthless, which is why I pointed these inaccurate facts out.
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/10/01/hackers-prov...
Could they have made a few grams of nalaxone? Sure it’s pretty simple. Did they make enough to make a difference? No. Did they make sufficiently pure drug so that people don’t get poisoned? Probably not.
And did they make the AIDS drug? He’ll no. That synthesis is way more complicated than their mini lab can handle.
It makes for good VICE articles, but these guys are amateurs who are likely going to get someone killed.
Except that’s totally unrelated to why he’s in prison.
He brought attention to his tax evasion for other reasons... but is it difficult to acknowledge that the direct legal cause of his jail time was evasion?
cf: “A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudophedrine from N-Methylamphetamine”
I found it hard to keep reading after that. What's it called when people get so emotional about a cause they just start acting irrationally and doing more harm than good?
In the long term, bring drugs to people without thorough testing and regulations. It's one thing for e.g. stage 4 cancer. It's another to let a Vioxx get through.
Strict regulations around the development and testing of drugs exist because no human is capable of evaluating efficacy for themselves, absent stringently controlled testing processes.
We laugh about "snake oil salesmen", but given the amount of money in nutriceuticals, GNC, and the like... I'd say the only damn holding back the torrent on the unsuspecting is the FDA.
They're talking about an encrypted file, right? If Merck just had this posted on "the dark web", constantly hammering them with bad passwords would probably clue them in. Incidentally, which did Merck value more, the database or the opportunity to keep it away from this group?
$ file .reaxys.tar
.reaxys.tar: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
I was at his 2018 talk and the Vice article did an excellent job of summing it up. Usually the HOPE videos come online a few weeks after the conference (it was last weekend).
More like $574 billion dollars in FY2016.
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/total-medicaid-...
While this is cool, it doesn't seem to generate attention in a way that could fix the underlying problem, except by dint of people who already know about it. Legislators are infamously subject to undue influence from medical companies that want to protect their oligopolies. A better hacking initiative might work to expose and excoriate those pharmaceutical and medical device companies which have abused the right to lobby in order to generate profits.
Exactly what I would also say as pro capitalist but anti patent.
The article is not about anarchism. It is about not staying idle while people can't afford drugs. The methods may be questionable, like the partnership with dealers. But at least they try to do something.
I just hope there is a way for them to make money without legal risks
If the recipe is so secret, do not patent it. Some companies forgo patents for that reason.
Here nobody is compelling anyone. My anti patent point just means not letting the government enforce IP rights. In case like these, it is not just ideology - it is morally wrong as explained in the quote.
If it's murder to apply intellectual property law and withhold drugs...what do we call the untold number of deaths that will result in the absence of a profit motive for developing new medicines? Is that murder?
The views of these people are childish and dangerous. I love their spirit, but their actual message here is just stupid and illiterate of basic economics.
/s
Now what? Well, on the one hand, everyone on earth will have cheap, timely access to every medicine that currently exists. That's pretty awesome. On the other hand, who's going to fund the development of new medicines? I'm certainly not going to invest in it, are you?
>After Four Thieves synthesized cabotegravir, it was just a matter of convincing at-risk populations to use it. According to Laufer, some Four Thieves affiliates began partnering with heroin dealers to cut their product with the cabotegravir.
I know nothing about chemistry/medicine, but this seems stupidly dangerous. There are good reasons to be patient and wait for drugs to go through the phase trials.
It also seems stupidly dangerous to allow uneducated/untrained people to make their own drugs at home by following directions. What if they unknowingly miss a step? For instance, the article is stating that opioids are needed to create Naloxone. That would be a costly mistake to make. They should never release this particular recipe.
These are truly brilliant people who probably have not spent a lot of time hanging around the average person. One reason governments and systems are in place is to prevent the non-well-rounded geniuses from giving an untrained mind an opportunity to make a devastating mistake.
EDIT: This reminds me of the guy who attempted to develop a nuclear reactor in his parents shed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
Making the drug and trying it on yourself is one thing. Sharing it with someone else who understands you and how you made it is somewhat similar. Convincing random people who don't know you to take it is crossing some sort of line, and setting up a situation where people are taking your homemade version of a non approved medication without even knowing it is just plain wrong. I know they are already taking heroin, but these are still people and not your lab rats. You shouldn't be making their decisions for them about what goes in their body.
In their do it yourself lab, what are they doing to remove stereoisomers?
How many unprosecuted crimes have been allowed in the course of war? Because it "had to be done"?
Prohibiting access to highly addictive narcotics? Makes some sense.
Prohibiting personal access to whatever you want to put in your body otherwise? Not such a strong argument.
If people want to risk killing themselves trying to cure their Hepatitis C infection, that's their business. In the same way we allow them to smoke, drink alcohol, drive vehicles, and own firearms.
