Comment Potential for abuse? (Score 1) 66
Which shape will get me highest the fastest? That's what I expect will be the most common question asked.
I see many possible problems with this, getting it FDA approved is just one of them. What will prevent someone from printing a hollow pill and stealing what what supposed to go in the middle to sell on the black market? The pills could be weighed but the pills could be filled with something of equal mass like sugar, sand, or something not so inert.
Will these pills be printed at the pharmacy? I seem to recall previous issues with poorly monitored medicine factories that did not require FDA oversight because they weren't "making" drugs as it was defined in law, they were merely mixing drugs that were made elsewhere and doing so in less than sanitary conditions. The FDA has failed us before and state agencies didn't feel compelled to pick up the slack, or was prevented from doing so by federal law.
Seems to me that there would be much less costly means to meter dosages than printing each pill individually. I can see this being used like it was described in the article, testing shapes in the real world before going through an expensive process of tooling up for mass production.
Edible 3D printing material could allow for making pills that carry all kinds of substances. Also, assuming high enough resolution on the printing process someone could make fake drugs. The little image on the label of what the pills inside a bottle should like like may no longer be sufficient to prevent theft of medicines, for example.
I can think of all kinds of legal and beneficial uses of technology like this too. As soon and someone reveals how this technology can be used for illegal activities in a public enough forum that some congresscritter sees it I suspect we're going to see a law passed that will ban or severely restrict this technology. I'll give the total freak out over the people that printed a firearm as an example of what kind of freak out to expect.
Good stuff, but the technology will very likely be held up by a government that cannot allow the public to have the freedom to experiment on their own.