becausechemistry

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.

No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)

I’d love to see cops start enforcing the no-right-on-red signs, especially when drivers cut off pedestrians to do it. But half the time they’ve got blue line or other pseudo fascist stickers all over their gigantic trucks when they do it, so I’m not holding my breath.

That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.

No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.

There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.

“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”

“Okay cool, how do you know that?”

“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”

That’s the thing. They have no way of even knowing if they messed up! I’m not even sure the way they could be messing up is a thing they know they should be worried about.

I’m not disputing the reasoning behind why this is important. But “it is important” does not imply that their solution is the right one.

People make illicit drugs chock full of impurities all the time too, and it fucks people up.

There are standards for purity on pharmaceuticals. Impurities have to be ridiculously low. Lower than you can measure in your garage.

These dudes either don’t know you need to even measure purity or have decided that it’s inconvenient and are ignoring it.

I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.

These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.

Unless our ability to cram delta-V into a spacecraft goes way beyond what seems possible now with chemical rockets, a trip to the moon is always gonna involve a few days of coasting through space. That’s always going to take more preparation than a transatlantic flight.