S1E46 - Four Thieves Vinegar Collective on The Promise of DIY Pharmaceutical Abortions and Drugs for Long Covid

Episode Notes

Episode summary: Margaret talks with Mixael from the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective about access to different medical technologies, biohacking access, and how the medical industrial complex complicates that. They talk about the importance of being able to audit medical access and ways you can build medical infrastructure in your own communities. They talk about old projects like the DIY Epi Pencil as well as new projects they are revealing, which include new ways to access medicines for abortion, regimens forpairing emergency contraception with PReP, and potential medicines for the treatment of Long Covid.

About the Guest: The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is an anarchist collective dedicated to bringing access medicines and medical technologies to those who need them but don’t have them. This is done primarily by publishing DIY methodologies for taking responsibility for one’s own health by building your own medical devices, manufacturing your own ingredients, or compounding medications yourself.

They can be found at https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ or on Twitter @4ThievesVinegar

Host Info: Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info: This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective on The Promise of DIY Pharmaceutical Abortions

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. And this week, we've got a special treat for you or i dunno if it's a treat. But, it's a really interesting episode. And, I think you might get as much out of it as I do. On this episode, I'll be talking with Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, who we've talked to before. They're basically people who do DIY wet chemistry and teach people how to make their own medications. And this time, they're going to be talking about how people could choose to make their own abortion medications, and also even some Long Covid drugs that have some promising successes and many other things besides, so a lot to dig into. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network da da ba da buh baa!

Jingle 01:12 What's up, y'all? I'm Pierson host of coffee with comrades. Coffee with comrades is rooted in militant joy. Our hope is to cultivate a warm and inviting atmosphere, like walking into your favorite coffee shop to sit down with some of your close friends and share a heart to heart conversation. New episodes premiere every Tuesday, so be sure to smash that subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. We are proud to be a part of the Channel Zero network.

Margaret 02:06 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns and then I guess a little bit about Four Thieves Vinegar Collective and what it is you all do?

Mixael 02:19 Yeah, my name is Mixael Laufer, I prefer to take whatever pronouns the person addressing me seems are appropriate of the moment. And the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is an anarchist collective devoted to bringing access to medicines and medical technologies to people who need them, but don't have them. And we're fairly agnostic about the methodologies that we use to try to bring that into being. So, we do a lot of different things, and including trying to find ways to build DIY medical devices. We do a lot with chemistry, and devising ways that people can build the active pharmaceutical ingredients of drugs that they might need. And we also look at methodologies and strategies by which people can acquire the things they need through non traditional channels. So, either looking for drugs that are packaged for other purposes, or looking for things that are closely related, that you might be able to get and convert into what you need. And that's what I spend most of my time doing, I'm the chief spokesperson for the collective. And, I do a lot of work in logistics. So, mostly I take people who are subject matter experts of different types and I try to make sure they have the tools and materials that they need, and that the information they need and the information that they have gets shuttled to the other subject matter experts with whom they work so that we can eventually release literature and guides for people to be able to take control of their own health and hopefully have a better quality of life.

Margaret 04:18 So, basically, what you all do is you're decentralized collective of people who've research ways to open source different medical technology, drugs and physical equipment, and then make that open source like show people how to make it and make the tools available for people to make it themselves?

Mixael 04:37 Yeah, so that is exactly correct. And to be a little more specific just for your listeners, we don't do any research of our own. We're not developing any new tools. We mostly are hijacking existing tools. We're looking for medical technologies that we already know work. We don't do things like clinical trials or try to develop new drugs that nobody's ever heard of. We look for things that are on the shelf, but inaccessible things that are perhaps not legal for various reasons, perhaps things that have merely not come into the marketplace because they weren't profitable, but still are effective, things that perhaps weren't approved because they were effective, but only in a small margin of the population, and, or in events where they're really inaccessible because the price has been jacked up too high. Or if you happen to be in a situation where the infrastructure just can't reach you, for whatever reason, either due to sclerotic bureaucracy, and you just can't get your insurance provider to give you what you need, or you might be in a rural place where there just isn't a pipeline to get such things. So yeah, we're, we look to take things that are already established that they work and try and get them to the people who need them.

Margaret 06:02 So what are some examples of the...I know, we're going to be talking about some of the new products that you all have been working on in a moment, but what are some of the examples of existing things that you all have done that you've released that people are on their own using and accessing right now, because of you all's work?

Mixael 06:20 Yeah. So the thing that we are ironically best known for was just a sort of side project that happened, but when, when Heather Bresch was lying in front of Congress about why she jacked up the prices of the epi pen, you had a lot of people knocking on our door, saying, "Why aren't you doing something about the epi pen?" So we put together a project that we lovingly and playfully called The Epi Pencil Project that allows you to make