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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 24 2017, @09:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the DIY-medicine-cabinet dept.

Dr. Mixael Laufer and the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective intend to reverse-engineer pharmaceuticals so that the public can make them themselves:

Laufer had already been working through the idea of how to provide free medication to people in need, but the close call with his own health deepened his conviction to solve the problem. So in 2015, he launched the Four Thieves Vinegar collective—a group of guerrilla hackers and scientists working to reverse-engineer critical pharmaceuticals and provide assistance with the synthesis of the compounds with the goal of providing "open-source" healthcare. The collective's goal is to shift the balance of power for making crucial healthcare choices back into the hands of the individuals, empowering people to make DIY versions of drugs and medical devices in their own homes.

[...] What Laufer intends to do is provide the means for the public to create their own pharmaceuticals when no alternatives are available. At the heart of his philosophy is the idea that healthcare is an inalienable human right that supersedes any laws of property. As Laufer explained, "There shouldn't be anything keeping anybody from any query. What is the most fundamental human right? The rights we have over our own bodies and minds. We should have the ability to explore intellectually and treat our body in whatever way we see fit." Last summer, the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective released plans for a $30 version of the Epi-Pen, which it calls the Epi-Pencil. In 2016, it also released the outline for Daraprim, the drug made famous by Martin Shkreli, who jacked up the price in 2015. Laufer said he doesn't track how many people use the plans, since his objective is simply to make them available to those who want them. "I don't know, and I make a point not to make it my business," he told me.

Some, including members of the medical community, have warned of the dangers of self-producing pharmaceuticals at home. "It's all fun and games until your product gets contaminated and you get a giant abscess in your muscle," one chemist told the Daily Beast. Others have criticized the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective for making it easier for drug manufacturers to produce illegal substances. But as Laufer sees it, if people find themselves in a place of desperate need, the consequences of home-brewed medications may be a calculated risk. Earlier this year, when it became clear that the Affordable Care Act would be under threat, Laufer said he started hearing more from people with serious health issues who were desperate for his help. "I got a flood of emails from people asking, 'How do I make this work?' and 'I'm gonna die in 19 days if I don't get this to work,'" he told me. "It's been hard." Will open-source pharmaceuticals be the answer for all Americans? Probably not. But it could be a potential option for people without any other options.

So far the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective website has instructions on building an "EpiPencil", which is an epinephrine autoinjector, and an "alpha" release for the synthesis of Pyrimethamine, a drug that costs pennies per dose outside of the U.S. The site also has a public PGP key, onion address (4thievzv3hh26qeh.onion), and a warrant canary.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by TheRaven on Friday February 24 2017, @12:39PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday February 24 2017, @12:39PM (#471073) Journal
    All current mainstream pharmaceuticals are protected by patents and covered by FDA filings that describe their production. This is used by researchers all of the time. You can't produce them at home because you'll be sued into oblivion by the patent owner or prosecuted by the FDA if you try to do so on a large scale, not because the information on how to produce them isn't publicly available.
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by BsAtHome on Friday February 24 2017, @01:36PM

    by BsAtHome (889) on Friday February 24 2017, @01:36PM (#471091)

    Making a patented invention at home is not necessarily illegal. Patents, generally, protect commercial exploitation of an invention. Making my own drug for my own use at home is hardly a commercial exploitation of an invention.

    Anyway, if I have the following choices:
    1 - do not take action because you are unable to afford any drugs, then you die
    2 - make my own drug and continue to live (or die anyway)

    The pharmaceutical company does not receive a dime in either scenario, so there is no commercial damage. This fact, and the fact that it would be really bad publicity to sue a dying person, will make the patents a mere side note.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 24 2017, @02:30PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 24 2017, @02:30PM (#471112)

      and the fact that it would be really bad publicity to sue a dying person

      So you haven't met many lawyers LOL.

      This intersects interestingly with village-size churches and gambling. Its very hard to get the village police chief to arrest the priest on gambling charges when he's the guy who baptized him and married him and buried his parents etc. Then its hard to convince the jury that the church is a hive of scum and villainy and therefore its gambling operation needs to be shut down. Then too the participants are all the white haired village elders who tell the mayor what to tell the police chief what to do... So thats how installing a slot machine in a biker bar gets you arrested on the same night the local church is having bingo night or raffling off the community handmade quilt or whatever. Taking that "above the law" attitude too far is how you end up turning the church into a dating club for priests and altar boys. But at a low level there's nothing too wrong with it and much as some monasteries commit all manner of DCMA and business process violations while refilling ink jet cartridges with relatively minimal legal interference, I could see a monastery plus some retired organic chemists producing all manner of interesting things with minimal interference. In the pre-capitalist days monasteries were the heavy industry of their time, and in the post-capitalist world where capitalism transcends its human participation in the economic system, its human employees and human customers, and its human state granted charter with a purpose of benefiting humanity and do the whole cultural escape velocity thing of siphoning off our worst sociopaths into a "safe space" for them, maybe much higher tech monasteries will come back.

      I mean, Campbells has never shut down a church soup kitchen although technically and abstract theoretically they're in competition.