‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine – Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses.
https://www.404media.co/email/63ca5568-c610-4489-9bfc-7791804e9535/?
‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine – Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses.
https://www.404media.co/email/63ca5568-c610-4489-9bfc-7791804e9535/?
4 Comments
Submission Statement
One of the most common dystopian tropes about the future is income inequality even greater than today, and most of the population semi-serfs to the 1%. Yet, there are reasons to think that won’t happen. Here’s one of them – technological decentralization. People will be able to take much of this power from the wealthy, they won’t have to protest or have it rationed. The less the 1% horde and financially vital resources like homes and healthcare, the more their power slips away.
I think there were a few episodes of Fringe about this
While I love the idea, I’d really, really want to have some sort of quality control when it is done making whatever you thought it was going to make. Sure, in theory it makes the molecule you want and doesn’t make lots of other bad chemicals, but how would your standard (relatively intelligent but not a chemist or pharmacist) person know?
On paper, this seems noble, but I’d be concerned that in actual use people are going to be making all sorts of stuff, intended or not, and it’s going to lead to enormous harms like people not actually making what they wanted or taking not enough/too much and getting/staying sick, docs not knowing what the fuck the patient is on when they show up to the ER, and bad actors using it to make popular and problematic street drugs better than before.