[nwiswell]

In many other countries, patents do not apply to personal use, where there is no sale.

Since Trikafta is a blend of 3 small-molecule drugs, is it possibly feasible to publish a do-it-yourself synthesis process?

Or perhaps the community could even come together to set up a lab, where individuals could travel and go through the motions to produce their own?

I recognize this isn't ideal, but it might be legal...

[deadbabe]

If you’re going to do all that why bother with legality, just push pills on a black market.

[A_D_E_P_T]

Yeah.

In all seriousness, you can buy the APIs directly from China/India and compound them yourself. It's easy and dirt cheap, in most cases. This is typically how underground steroid labs and other illicit pharmacies work. It's in some cases how legitimate compounding pharmacies work.

So how do you know what you're getting is pure, or even real? Simple, before shipping it to the US, you send it over to an analytical lab in China and have them run GC/MS or LC/MS on the chemical raw material. Since it's supposedly a pure compound, that should be easy, and there's very rarely any ambiguity as to the results. This also ensures that you're not inadvertently importing anything on the DEA's scheduled list.

[nwiswell]

This feels very Dallas Buyer's Club.

I assume communities exist on the Internet for this kind of "drug piracy"?

[A_D_E_P_T]

Yeah, IRL too. 5-10 years ago there were some biohacking collectives around the Bay Area that did everything from pharmaceuticals to experiments with CRISPR. I don't know if they're still around -- I left that scene when I left the USA a few years ago -- but if you're in the area you might want to give it a look. (As an aside, I heard that a few scene-adjacent people have recently gotten gene-mod therapy; Patri Friedman, for instance, received follistatin therapy.)

Nootropics were a pretty popular trend around the same time, and I knew a lot of guys who would import weird drugs and peptides from Russia and China. It's the same sort of procedure I outlined in my last post, in that you're ordering drugs or drug-active-ingredient-powder from abroad... And then hopefully testing it.

Roughly 10 years ago, when [redacted breakthrough drug] was released, I helped some friends set up a pirate pharmacy. Those were good times.

[nwiswell]

That's really cool. I don't have a bio/pharma technical background but I'm very sympathetic to the scene and the ethos so I'll have to check it out.