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‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Sharing because I found this very interesting.

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.

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[–] 53 points 2 years ago (5 children)

This is super cool and helpful as a resource but I really don't think people without a chemistry background should be doing anything more than following precise instructions, hopefully with some form of verification test at the end. The idea to have people without a chemistry background use a forked version of askcos and just run with it is a little scary.

The affordable Controlled Lab Reactor for diy is fantastic for helping people follow precise instructions to the letter just all of those instructions should be meticulously vetted by actual chemists and have some safeguard tests at the end where necessary. It seems the founder wants that vision too at the end of the conference just there's not enough of a community yet to support it.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Yeah..... This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren't just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.

    Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.

    This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don't really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren't equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I see drug lords getting into this if it is feasible and it isn't a good scenario. It would paint them as real saviors and make the situation more unstable.

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  • [+] [S] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I don't know about where you live, but here the drug lords owns some territory. And within that territory, they take political actions like closing the nearby churches, for example. I think selling actual medication could serve their purpose very well. They already sell smartphones for a low price to the local people ($15).

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