The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pngb/how-to-make-your-own-medicine-four-thieves-vinegar-collective

by surlyadopter • 8 years ago

218 137 8 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

19963• 8 years ago

“The rhetoric that is espoused by people who defend intellectual property law is that this is theft,” Laufer told me. “If you accept that axiomatically, then by the same logic when you withhold access to lifesaving medication that's murder. From a moral standpoint it's an imperative to enact theft to prevent murder.”

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

lovich3• 8 years ago

I don't see how that's a pro capitalist argument. Your not getting rid of a monopoly on the IP, you are compelling people to give up there property to prevent a worse evil

19963• 8 years ago

You asked before that I clarify my arguments.

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.

dsr_• 8 years ago

These people are Hackers.

jgtrosh3• 8 years ago

I wish there was an equivalent of CI and peer-reviewed pull-requested contribution to their system, to ease collaborative improvement to the methods. You'd really want many sets of eyes able to look at all aspects of the drugs to vastly reduce risk.

femiagbabiaka• 8 years ago

that sounds like a magnificent startup idea that I completely lack the expertise to execute on. hopefully someone else tackles it.

yosito2• 8 years ago

I saw one of Michael's talks. They do share the data about their hardware and processes openly (though I don't know where/how, since it's not the kind of info I understand). But one of the things he mentioned needing more open information about is the chemistry. There are databases of chemical reactions that can be used to train AIs to find new, easier and cheaper ways to synthesize medications, but those databases are controlled by large for-profit corporations who refuse to release the data. Presumably for "safety" reasons, but it's not hard to imagine that "safety" isn't the whole story.

Footkerchief• 8 years ago

Some of said databases: http://www.organicworldwide.net/content/reaction-databases

rubyn00bie• 8 years ago

I don’t know if YC proactively seeks organizations to fund but these folks look like a pretty small potential investment with a huge social win. If ever there was a time to “do good” with that enormous pile of capital and connections y’all have— this might be it.

34k5uoi5ui2• 8 years ago

This is truly amazing work, and I hope they are able to achieve their goals. The future of humanity depends on it.

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...

imbruglia• 8 years ago

I hate to be negative. But I have seen enough of these sort of initiative over the years to be skeptical. In reality it seldom makes sense to do it yourself. Few things in general needs to be built or invented. If they do chances are they aren't the ones to do it. It almost always makes more sense acquire the capability to do what you want somewhere else. But as soon as you do that all the edgy rhetoric and potential goes out the window in favor of liability and reality. So reality eventually becomes the enemy of the escapist fantasy. And the powerful remain powerful while the real problems go unsolved. I would very much like to be wrong though.

mplewis2• 8 years ago

Providing access to otherwise-inaccessible drugs is a real problem. The fact that normal people can accomplish this through an anarchist collective is incredible and should be lauded.

monochromatic• 8 years ago

After a few minutes of gloating about pharma bro Martin Shkreli “rotting at Fort Dix” for raising the price of Daraprim

Except that’s totally unrelated to why he’s in prison.

pauljaworski• 8 years ago

Right, that bothered me a little too.

j88439h84• 8 years ago

Seems like that's exactly why he's in prison, legalisms aside.

mertd• 8 years ago

He went due to securities fraud but one could argue that, if it weren't due to the drug price thing, he could have flown under the radar, since the investors didn't lose any money.

andrepd• 8 years ago

Just goes to show.

JshWright2• 8 years ago

Yeah, and Al Capone just went to jail for "tax evasion"...

citrablue4• 8 years ago

He did go to jail for that, unless I'm confused.

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?

AnabeeKnox• 8 years ago

It's a Vice article. Read it for the sensation, not the facts.

tomcooks• 8 years ago

How else would they spam their Shkreli interview done when he was hip

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

...Chematica’s database is currently posted on a password protected website on the dark web. During his talk at HOPE this year, Laufer implored the audience to help with cracking the password and releasing the data into the world.

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?

zxcmx2• 8 years ago

RAR files can be cracked offline.

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

Sure, but "password protected website" is a weird synonym for "RAR file".

r3dk1ng• 8 years ago

It is an encrypted zip file. Not a password protected website. Not a rar. I downloaded it and ran file on it. Oddly the filename is .tar.

    $ file .reaxys.tar 
    .reaxys.tar: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

As one of the other top level comments said, the links to it are here: https://twitter.com/MichaelSLaufer/status/102263726560276889...

darawk15• 8 years ago

Indeed, Laufer and his collaborators can’t stop pissing off powerful people because Four Thieves is living proof that effective medicines can be developed on a budget outside of institutional channels.

Synthesized. Not developed. Synthesizing medicines is easy. Developing them is extremely difficult.

klipt• 8 years ago

I can "render" a movie onto my harddrive from bittorrent in minutes. I don't know why Pixar has to spend so much time on their rendering! /s

malkia• 8 years ago

If stealing movies helped people survived, given financial difficulties, then they'll do it. Survival beats "no-steal" laws.

sabujp• 8 years ago

this is the worst analogy ever

VvR-Ox• 8 years ago

Sorry but that is not a valid comparison.

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).

Eric_WVGG• 8 years ago

Most of the replies to this comment don't seem to understand that "/s" indicates sarcasm.

Hasz• 8 years ago

Eh, it's not as simple. From what it looks like, they're not just copying syntheses from the patent application. With this Chematica data, it seems like they were pursuing novel syntheses for a variety of drugs in order to minimize side product formation or make the synthesis easier, which is an impressive feat.

That being said, they aren't running clinical trials or evaluating drug efficacy, which is another difficult part of drug development.

darawk15• 8 years ago

You're right, they are doing something a bit novel, which is cool from a technical/hacker perspective. But clinical trials and efficacy aren't just 'another difficult part', they are the difficult part. Synthesis routes are an after-thought to any serious pharmaceutical company.

darawk15• 8 years ago

“The rhetoric that is espoused by people who defend intellectual property law is that this is theft,” Laufer told me. “If you accept that axiomatically, then by the same logic when you withhold access to lifesaving medication that's murder. From a moral standpoint it's an imperative to enact theft to prevent murder.”

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.

blhack3• 8 years ago

Well if we could just rich people to find their projects.

darawk15• 8 years ago

Ok. Let's imagine a world where he achieves his dream. We've democratized access to molecular synthesis with no quality issues. Anyone, anywhere can safely and effectively produce any medicine of their choosing, without regard for IP laws.

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?

skadamou• 8 years ago

I see your point but I think that there is a middle ground to be struck here. I don't think medical care and drug research can be ethically applied upon the basis of economic motivation alone. Through this lens Laufer makes some sense. You raise a strong and valid counterpoint however. There is currently a huge profit motive to develop new medical treatments (so long as they are indeed profitable). What will the effects be if we reduce that profit motive? This is a complex question that I think requires a nuanced answer that takes into account both our moral responsibility to take care of the sick but also recognizes the incentives innate to human nature

darawk15• 8 years ago

Yep, totally agree. I think people get mad when they see that a cure for a disease exists that they can't have. They don't think about the institutions that created it in the first place. On the other hand, I think we could do a better job at providing medicines to people who genuinely cannot pay, or cannot obtain it for some odd reason (like the company stopped making it).

_emacsomancer_2• 8 years ago

Right. Because exorbitant profit is the only motivation for research.

darawk15• 8 years ago

Someone has to buy the lab equipment and pay the scientists. If you think their profit is 'exorbitant', then you should be investing in pharma. But historically and as a whole, they generate returns comparable to the rest of industry.

blhack3• 8 years ago

These people are going to kill somebody. But hey, lets do it and be legends! Think of the instagram likes!

spaceflunky2• 8 years ago

“...the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said. He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of white pills. “I guess I better hand out some more,” Laufer said as he tossed the Daraprim into the audience.

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?

TheSpiceIsLife2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what harm was done here?

citrablue4• 8 years ago

In that moment, representing the barriers to safe and effective medicine as something that one can throw from their pockets.

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.

MorrisofOrange• 8 years ago

He`s literary throwing homemade pharmaceuticals like they are candy. These drugs have side effects. They probabally haven't been tested for impurities. If someone took them they could have gotten seriously hurt. I like their ideas though(especially the DIY epi pen).

PhasmaFelis3• 8 years ago

It's definitely a stunt, but I don't see it as being particularly irresponsible. Daraprim's use is quite narrow and its side effects are pretty unpleasant; nobody's going to abuse it. It's not like he's throwing handfuls of homemade Ritalin.

daveFNbuck2• 8 years ago

I think it's pretty irresponsible to throw a handful of pills with nasty side effects into a crowd.

spaceflunky2• 8 years ago

If a stunt, then why throw away and waste potentially useful medicine like that? I understand the point he's trying to make, but the way he goes about it underlines his childish view of everything.

agotterer2• 8 years ago

Michaels first HOPE talk in 2016 is really worth watching - https://archive.org/details/livestream-130731041.

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).

Something1234• 8 years ago

I was there too. I loved his talk, but I didn't get a good picture of the file hash or link he wanted us to download.

agotterer2• 8 years ago

This was the one I took: https://pasteboard.co/HwyMWYX.jpg

waluigi• 8 years ago

This owns. It's important to realize that a lot of at-risk populations that would most benefit from medication are often the most economically disadvantaged, and that our current healthcare system often excludes them from the help they need. Obviously, lab-grade medication is less risky than stuff that's been produced in a mason jar, but when the choice is between having access to life-saving medical equipment or not, the choice is pretty clear. If you have concerns with how this could hurt people, then the best solution would be to make sure that everyone has access to the care they need, rather then allocating care on the basis of how much they can afford.

robbiep• 8 years ago

An interesting approach to the criminal lack of healthcare to vulnerable populations in the US (and potentially other places with third world health systems)

briandear• 8 years ago

Is there actually a criminal lack of medical care? What is Medicaid? Tens of billions of dollars are going to help nobody?

zaroth• 8 years ago

I guess you’re being downvoted because it’s not “tens of billions of dollars” at all!

More like $574 billion dollars in FY2016.

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/total-medicaid-...

JshWright2• 8 years ago

Medicaid is great[1], but it serves a relatively small fraction of the population. I assume the parent comment is referring to the fact that most other developed nations provide universal healthcare, at lower per capita cost, with better outcomes and doctor/patient satisfaction ratings.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx1-X9wpUk4

mplewis2• 8 years ago

They sure aren't helping everyone.

horsecaptin• 8 years ago

Didn't Shkreli make Daraprim available for free to anyone who couldn't afford it?

ceejayoz3• 8 years ago

Such "patient assistance programs" are common, and they're designed to further maximize profits at the expense of heightened insurance premiums over time.

refurb5• 8 years ago

What? Giving away free drugs causes insurance premiums to rise? How does that work?

shoo• 8 years ago

If you like pharma piracy, and dystopian science fiction, you may also like Annalee Newitz's novel _Autonomous_ https://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/11/15/read-the-first-four-...

scythe• 8 years ago

The essential problem here seems to be that the FDA approval process for medicine laboratories is impractically severe and probably represents an instance of regulatory capture.

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.

eezurr3• 8 years ago

Although the initial clinical results with cabotegravir were extremely promising, Four Thieves grew impatient with waiting for it to become commercially available. (The drug is currently undergoing Phase III FDA trials, which means it’s being clinically tested on a large cohort of human subjects.)
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

phyller• 8 years ago

It's ironic to me that some anti-control people that buck against the system don't seem to have a problem when it's them making decisions for others.

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?

ethbro4• 8 years ago

Their point that the paternalist-legal argument falls in the face of life-or-death circumstances has merit though.

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.

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

At the pharmacy, a pair of single use Mylan epipens can cost over $600 and the company’s generic version costs $300 per pair, but an ongoing shortage means you probably can’t find them, even if you can afford them.

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.

thatcat• 8 years ago

The 109 price seems like the market responding to the 30 $ diy epipen hack released 2 years ago.

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/10/01/hackers-prov...

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

It was definitely a response to the shortage and bad publicity around epipens. Not sure it’s possible to know which was the more direct cause. It could have just been CVS going for some good publicity.

yosito2• 8 years ago

I met Michael at free software conference in Havana, Cuba in November. Didn't know who he was at first, after one of the talks he approached me and asked me if I wanted to get a beer. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling well and turned him down. Later I saw him give a talk and realized he was the EpiPencil guy. He gave a great talk and I had the opportunity to have a few more conversations with him. He's obviously very intelligent. But he's also a deeply empathetic and passionate person who's giving his best effort to make the world a better place. Super inspiring!

tfolbrecht• 8 years ago

Love these guys, last press I saw on them was their OTS epipen, glad to hear they aren't defunct.

anonu• 8 years ago

This sort of reminds me of the ability to 3D print guns. Technology gets cheaper and more efficient and ultimately democratizes access to "things"... Physical printed items, transportation, drugs... I think we're only scratching the surface here with this.

peteretep• 8 years ago

These precursors are controlled by the federal government ... they’d make medicine from poison [by using the street drugs to get back to the precursors]

cf: “A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudophedrine from N-Methylamphetamine”

https://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf

thx11389793• 8 years ago

is this actually a legit synthesis? as a non-chemist it has the air of plausibility, author names and quips aside.

refurb5• 8 years ago

As a former pharmaceutical chemist I’m calling bullshit.

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.

vzcx• 8 years ago

Is there some route to naloxone that I am not aware of that doesn't start from some opiate or opium alkaloid? The morphine total syntheses I've read were rather involved and low-yield. Perhaps progress made on the biosynthetic step through reticuline? That would be exciting.

refurb5• 8 years ago

Article covers that. They start with oxycodone. From that a reduction to hydromorphone and then methylation to nalaxone. Not easy chemistry, but only two steps.

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

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