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‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine
(www.404media.co)
This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.
I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.
This is a colossally dangerous thing.
Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.
The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.
Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.
There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.
I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.
This is not a good solution.