[namuol]

I don't think this analogy resonates particularly well with the drug manufacturing process.

I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D, not manufacture. The cost of manufacture probably varies wildly (with the most expensive being bespoke treatments), but as the talk shows, there have been many examples where a (relatively) simple-to-manufacture drug is kept from those who need it due to prices that do not reflect the cost of manufacture.

Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.

[8bitbeep]

True, it’s just that the original quote is hard swallow. Try melting sand and polishing your own lenses and compare that to a US$ 5 glass.

[dredmorbius]

Or ... a US$1,000 pair of Luxottica spectacles.

[bsder]

> Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.

Ever watch a non-chef bake a cake? If you have, that experience should give you great concern about people playing with drug recipes.

In addition, most drugs do not have a "nice" synthesis that doesn't leave a whole bunch of glop in the afterproducts. Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time.

[ryao]

People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs. The cooking analogy would be studying at a culinary school prior to preparing pufferfish without a license.

[bsder]

> People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs.

The girl who needs mifepristone will not be an organic chemist. The trans-person who needs their hormones will not be an organic chemist. etc.

What part of: "Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time." did you miss?

We know what happens when drugs are made illegal--they wind up adulterated with god knows what--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The "solution" is making sure that these drugs are legal and available. The solution is social and political--we need people to put in as much effort into the politics as they do into dubious "tech" solutions.

[ryao]

Your comparison of ethanol distillation to drug synthesis assumes that recipes for drug synthesis are public like instructions for distillation. Recipes for drug synthesis are trade secrets, not public knowledge.

If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMaTrgUKC1w

He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.

Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.

[miki123211]

> I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D

Not just its R&D, but also the R&D of the 10 other drugs which looked promising, had a lot of money invested in them, but didn't end up working out in the end.

You could very easily pass a law invalidating all drug patents, and making generics for any drug easily available. This would make all drug prices go down drastically. It would definitely work, there's no question about it. The anti-capitalists are very much right about this.

What they're missing, though, is that this law would completely remove the incentive to make any new drugs. The progress of medicine would instantly slow down to a halt. All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.

[ben_w]

> All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.

Unless there's government funding.

Also consider that for both patents and government funding, there are other jurisdictions which won't do what your government does, so there's a Nash equilibrium problem where every country has people who want to defect (delete patents) to get free stuff whose research was paid for by the profit margin in the jurisdiction which keeps the patents.

[ryao]

The linked page is the one that said:

> We all know that custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique tools are always better than something factory made.

This is wrong and he debunked it.