The first time I met Michael Laufer was offering to the facts medicines crowd in the house, worth thousands of dollars, the biennial conference Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), in New York.

After pleased that Martin Shkreli was now confined to rot at Fort Dix for a while 'for having increased the price Daraprim, a drug against HIV can save lives, 13 to 750 dollars, Laufer passes to more serious things.
In his camo jacket, peeled and with a dark beard, Laufer is not exactly the type who would you ask a doctor's advice, but this is precisely the point of his speech.
As founder of the Four Thieves Vinegar, a network of volunteers anarchists and hackers developing medicines do-it-yourself, Laufer has spent the last ten years of his life working to free drugs to save lives by monopoly large companies that own them.
From the legal point of view, it is more qualified to conduct mathematical studies of nuclear weapons, rather than treating patients.
Here he met his co-workers of the Four Thieves who have come from all over the world for the conference and unveiled new technological developments in the medical field.
"A toast to the victims, children with cancer and AIDS," he said, raising his glass of bourbon and citing Felipe Andres Coronel, hip hop artist also known as Immortal Technique.
Over the past decade, Four Thieves put a spoke in the wheel to the Food and Drug Administration, the billionaire executives of pharmaceutical companies, doctors and chemists of the most prestigious US universities.
Laufer and her have a mission to disrupt the powerful, and the Four Thieves is proof that there is an alternative to produce drugs reducing costs and remaining outside the institutional circuits.
So Four Thieves has developed an open source and portable chemical laboratory that allows anyone to produce their own Daraprim, with only 25 cents a pill.
The pharmaceutical industry in the US is worth about 446 billion dollars, and its borders are carefully guarded by government agencies like the FDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
By distributing free medical devices and drugs, this collective of anarchists and hackers is threatening the fate of one of the most prolific and regulated industries in the world.
Members of the Four Thieves claim to be able to produce five different types of drugs, using the MicroLab.
In an attempt to replicate a very expensive machinery that is only found in chemical laboratories, the instrument manufactured by Four Thieves has a considerably lower price and consists of only readily available material.
Some plastic tube and a thermistor for measuring the temperature are attached to the cap for circulating fluids and trigger the chemical reaction that allows you to create some drugs.
To date, Four Thieves has used this device to produce the handcrafted Naloxone, a drug to prevent overdoses narcotics, also known as Narcan; the Daraprim, medicine for infections among HIV patients; the Cabotegravir, a preventive drug against HIV that should only be taken four times a year; and mifepristone and misoprostol, two chemical agents used for medical abortion.
With the Trump administration and its candidates to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, the collective feels even more the need to improve their drug for abortion.
The fear is that the federal government may soon be delegated to individual states the decision to make or not abortions, thus preventing a large number of citizens to terminate a pregnancy voluntarily.
For this reason, Tim Heilers, marine and former coach specializing in Louisville sonar, has joined the collective Four Thieves from February.
"Kentucky, where I live, is a very conservative and I think it's very likely that will soon make abortion illegal," says Heilers.
"I think we give people the opportunity to make mifepristone when both critical need to address the situation."
Although the collective Four Thieves has produced to date five successful drugs, only the "recipe" downloadable from their website is that of Daraprim.
To work around this problem, Laufer and his aides adopted a protocol seemingly counterintuitive: create drugs from harmful substance.
They could not buy the precursors of Naloxone, ok, but narcotics are readily available.
And so, after buying contraband dell'OxyContin, the collective has managed to produce the chemical reactions necessary to extract from this the precursor to make the Naloxone.
"Would you rather break the law and living, dead, or being a good citizen?"
"Some traffickers nineties very intelligent discovered that with a single reaction [with OxyContin] could get oxymorphone, an item up to six times more powerful," says Laufer.
These unorthodox approaches to health care are the norm in the world of pharma-hacking, where the ultimate goal is to help people at all costs.
There is a drug called cabotegravir, for example, which is a preventive prophylaxis against HIV that would prevent infection through the use of shared needles, tested on monkeys.
Initial clinical results of cabotegravir look extremely promising, and the collective Four Thieves is keen to see the product available on the market (today is subjected to the testing phase III at the FDA, then a large group of human beings).
The fact that the Cabotegravir is still being tested has not deterred the Four Thieves anarchists who are already trying to provide the medicine to those who need it.
As they continue the tests for synthesizing a cabotegravir do-it-yourself, some members of the group have been purchasing a PrEP available on the market under the name of tenofovir and merge it with an inert stabilizer to offer it then to heroin dealers who can then decide whether to cut their product with PrEP as "extra service" for their clients.
Who should choose this innovative formula, will have "a heroine with a new side effect," says Laufer.
The original prototype of the MicroLab, done with the recovery pipes, the radius of a bicycle and a jar.
And although Laufer has made the fight against pharmaceutical lobby a true art, the pending court cases are likely to undermine his Medicines liberalization mission.
When a pharmaceutical company produces a new drug, it holds the patent on the molecules that make effective the product.
Since Four Thieves does not sell or distribute the drugs produced by its members, their activity is not technically illegal in the eyes of the FDA, but the agency has already issued a public notice that warns about the methods used do-it-yourself by the collective.
Shortly after Four Thieves made public his version of EpiPen do-it-yourself at $ 30, the FDA issued a statement to the media stating that "use drugs not approved by prescription for personal use is a practice potentially risky, "without openly referring to the collective.
The absurd thing is that only a few months later, the FDA sent a warning letter to Pfizer that would not have investigated hundreds of complaints about EpiPen not working, which in some cases resulted in the death of users.
In May, the FDA issued a new statement which announces the severe shortage of EpiPen.
For the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), none of the drugs produced by the collective is a controlled substance, then their possession is subject exclusively to local law on medical prescriptions.
What makes Four Thieves is actually just make available information on how to produce home some medicines, and give life to a network of open source tools to make this possible.
And if some people decide to use the information published by the collective to produce their own medicine, they become managers, but Four Thieves do not pretend that the published instructions serve "only for educational purposes."
"According to the rhetoric of those who defend the law on intellectual property, this would be theft," I Laufer says.
"But if we accept this axiom, according to the same logic, those who deny the needy access to medicines that can save their lives could be charged with murder.
"So yes, we are actually inviting people to break the law," adds Laufer.
The reason for triggering that inspired the creation of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has been a journey of Laufer in Salvador, in 2008, while still a student.
Posted on site to document human rights violations in the country, Laufer visited a clinic in a rural area and realized that they had already exhausted by three months every type of contraceptive.
When the clinic contacted the central hospital in San Salvador, he discovered that there were over contraceptives for a long time.
Laufer is shocked by the situation and disbelief that the staff at the hospital he could not reproduce the drug, relatively simple to produce and been around for about 50 years.
If drug traffickers were able to produce complex chemical drugs illegally, in makeshift laboratories, surely the same approach could be used to create drugs that could save the lives of many people.
Shortly after his return from the trip to Central America, Laufer created the collective, but its existence was made public only in 2016, the HOPE conference.
During his first intervention in the event of hackers, Laufer made a demonstration the method developed by the collective to produce "EpiPencil" do-it-yourself with 30 dollars, distributed Daraprim home made between the pubblic, showed a prototype at an early stage of MicroLab and interpellated the stage also Martin Shkreli (which never responded).
All the people of Four Thieves I met have a background of technical studies, no one medical professional.
Laufer, for example, has done studies of nuclear physics and is the director of a math program at Menlo College in Silicon Valley, this is his job "official."
Today the group has experts in biology, chemistry, data science, programming and hardware that work together according to current projects.
The first are the open source hardware like epipencil and chemical synthesizer MicroLab, which can be constructed using readily available materials and which components created with 3D printing.
"I think it's critical that the information needed to produce the medicines that we need to be easily accessible to anyone even vaguely interested in the subject," I Laufer says.
The idea is that anyone can download the instructions, read the list of materials, sort them, see the instructions to understand how to assemble them, program them, load code, ordering chemical precursors and then produce the drug. "
Still, there are experts who warn about the facts drugs at home and have not been tested sufficiently.
Eric Von Hippel, MIT economist who does research and "open innovation," is excited about the production of drugs do-it-yourself, but only under certain conditions.
Cites, for example, a pilot program developed in the Netherlands who would be exploring the independent production of drugs specifically for individual patients, as a good example for inspiration.
Von Hippel argues that it could be dangerous for patients produce in total autonomy drugs.
"If the chemical reactions are not made under ideal conditions, the risk is that you create dangerous products derivatives, along with medication that should result from the transaction," he explains Von Hippel email.
"The accurate control of the reactor conditions is almost impossible with a rudimentary instrument as proposed by the MicroLab Four Thieves Vinegar Collective."
DeMonaco suggests that the best solution would be that patients were to bring into contact with specialized pharmacies in the preparation of compounds.
These facilities produce personalized medicines for customers and DeMonaco claims that are capable of synthesizing the same substances produced by Four Thieves cheap, but with "the necessary security measures."
"Unless the system is idiot-proof and includes a check on the final product, the user is exposed to many risk factors," explains DeMonaco in his email.
"The spread [of the tools provided by Four Thieves] might create a new category for the Darwin Awards."
Von Hippel and DeMonaco agree in saying that the drugs do-it-yourselfer should be thoroughly cleansed and subjected to careful testing before the patient can use them safely.
"But the problems related to the equipment and to medical science to be addressed and resolved before they can establish safe handicraft production of medicines."
Faced with the rise of the drugs and the constant shortage, many hospitals have started to produce in the laboratory medicines to cut costs.
The difference, though, is that these hospitals often have sophisticated laboratories and qualified medical personnel, things that reduce the risks drastically.
Four Thieves is not unaware of the risks they run in providing this type of documentation and allow users to produce their own medicines independently.
Still, there are several ways to reduce this probability and one of the largest collective contributions to medicine do-it-yourself is the priority given to the reduction of pain due to its research and development program.
Four Thieves will identify processes that reduce the risk of toxic reactions to minimize the danger to the user.
When the collective started its activities, requested support for a startup named Chematica which gathered over 250 years of chemical research in a huge database and developed software that uses this data to predict the best possible process to create the desired molecule .
Thanks to this database and software, Four Thieves were able to create a simple synthesis and safe processes to produce vital drugs.
After the sale, Four Thieves has lost access to the software and, more importantly, to the database.
Laufer explains that the team that is the scientific data within the collective has created an open source version of the software Chematica.
But as every hacker knows, sometimes the data "falling from trucks," which is a nice way of saying that now the Chematica database is hosted on a web site dark protected by a password.
During his speech at the HOPE conference this year, Laufer has implored the audience to help him crack the password to gain access to data.
Access the Chematica data on synthesis processes would open a huge door to the next chapter of the drugs do-it-yourself, but until then the progress will be slow and uncertain.
The most expensive drug on the market is called Glybera and is used to treat the family of lipoprotein lipase deficiency, a hereditary disease which affects only about 7,000 people worldwide.
The deficiency of lipoprotein lipase prevents the normal breakdown of body fat, which results in abdominal pain, acute pancreatitis, enlargement of the kidneys and liver, and fat deposits under the skin.
Glybera is a drug that helps treat these symptoms and it is critical to improve the quality of life of people living with the disease.
In 2017, UniQuire, the company that produces Glybera stopped selling the drug in Europe because of too little demand.
This means that the 1200 European citizens suffering from family deficits lipoprotein lipase today do not have access to care.
In the future, Laufer Four Thieves would like to concentrate on the production of drugs for rare diseases, so that no one remains without a cure for his ailment.
For example, I Laufer explains, many of the drugs for these diseases are made from natural elements, such as mold and mildew.
The basic concept is the same as when a "seeding" user, with a seed, a media file on torrent sites.
Therefore, Four Thieves is exploring the possibility of using books and CD cases to grow organic precursors.
So Laufer and his started to inject mycelium in the books, that feeds on pages and growing.
Similarly, the CD act as a Petri dish and if properly treated can to proliferate bacteria and organic precursors.
The advantage is that the shipping in the US for the media, such as books and CDs, costs less and is not subject to controls.
In the meantime, though, Four Thieves remains focused on improving its MicroLab and the process of synthesizing new drugs.
Recently, the group has started to produce its own circuit board for MicroLab, which would make it even easier to install the device at home.
If the collective were to succeed in order, Hepatitis C could soon disappear in the whole world, regardless of the income of the sick.
In a time when many US citizens do not have access to basic health care, the ideas of Laufer sound intuitive and radical at the same time.
To Laufer, Four Thieves is a collective that deals with medicine but also free flow of information and personal autonomy.

From Vice