oh no i threw an offhand remark and now i have to elaborate

well i don’t see their actual procedures anywhere so i’m going off my memory, they claimed to be able to make naloxone for example

this works like this: first react oxycodone with allyl bromide (chloride?), then add that quatenary ammonium salt to sodium ethylthiolate solution, and this should take off both N-methyl from ammonium and O-methyl from phenolate. peachy, there’s your naloxone (do i need to draw this?)

and on paper it’s all fine, but problems pile in. for example allyl bromide is fucking nasty, it’s volatile and pretty toxic, you definitely don’t want untrained people to handle it. (you can hardly catch me in a lab wearing labcoat, but this is one of reagents that i’ll have it on, and handle only under fumehood) ethanethiol if mishandled will make entire city block think that there’s a gas leak. and that’s only starting materials, oxycodone is obviously active compound, and iirc they dissolved it in DMF, some polar solvents like this have that nasty property of basically carrying compounds through skin into the bloodstream (that’s how gel patches with fentanyl or some hormones work). anyway,

that all works if it works, but for example, if allyl bromide somehow flies away, and it can because it’s volatile, then you don’t have what you think you have. that means that you have fucked up, and if you don’t catch this and go through anyway, you’ll get oxymorphone instead of naloxone, which has opposite pharmacological effect. that’s pretty fucking bad thing, especially when it’s advertised as “cook up your own opioid overdose antidote at home”. second step might not work at all if solvents or glassware are wet for example, or there are problems with stirring. this is not hard hard chemistry, medchem is made this way to be as easy and reliable as it gets on purpose - to get rid of weird problems in industrial scale synthesis and such (organic chemists that do development of new reactions sometimes are opposed in industry if they introduce a new thing that makes everyone’s life easier on basis that it’s a new thing), but it has to be done right with proper analysis and i can’t emphasize this enough. you can’t do any analysis with glass jars and diy syringe pumps, probably the best thing is melting point determination and i wouldn’t trust even that

there’s a reason why it’s laboratory glassware and not plasticware, i don’t trust these 3d printed parts or silicone tubing to survive anything substantial, in lab we use glass, teflon, some stainless steel for less demanding things

then, where do you even get starting materials, purify them (harder than it sounds like, esp when you need to get water and oxygen out. this includes solvents), measure them out properly. making a miniature jacketed reactor is not the hard part of making chemistry, equivalent thing can be done with a rbf, some cooling or heating bath, thermometer and magnetic stirrer. you know, like in every lab scale synthesis from undergraduate up. the harder bit is the everything else aspect, it’s a very much draw the rest of the fucking owl situation

second link is derek lowe’s commentary on this, he’s in that industry for decades by now, his response has a bit of that bitchy “we fearless capitalists made that thing” thing, he described himself a republican once (non-trumpist) but he’s not an actual monster and he knows what he’s talking about

i get where this sentiment comes from, but i think beehive is more reliable at this thing that thing tries to do, that is making sure that some people know how to make some pharmaceuticals (or similar) unofficially in their garage. but scope is different, compounds are different, target audience is different, and beehive expects some lab experience, won’t hold your hand all the way and you’re very much on your own, legally, organizationally, and such

doubly so because “just fix the fucking US medical system” is the actual answer for a lot of the example targets