Posted on 10/31/2025 1:33:58 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.
The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone in which Vitalia was located, Próspera, claimed on its website that a company could go to market 10 to 100 times faster there than the United States, which requires three phases of trials—testing first for safety, then for dosage and efficacy within a given population—before a product can be advertised or sold. Many drugs fail in what’s called the “valley of death” between promising early studies and the outcome of Phase 2 or 3 trials; 90 percent of drugs don’t make it through a process that can, all told, cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Vitalia joined a growing number of special economic zones and bespoke cities sprouting up around the world, usually to provide some form of relaxed taxation or regulation. Many are targeting medical innovation, trying to attract a new class of scientist you might...
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I had a good friend at a church in Boquete, Panama who used to be a hospital nurse in the States. She had come to Panama for a new treatment for breast cancer that was not approved in the U.S. This was a topical treatment that was supposed to push the tumor up through the skin where it could be removed by scalpel.
It worked, yet it didn’t. Soon after the tumor was removed, it was discovered she now had cancer in her liver and died a short time later. Leigh was a faithful and brave woman. She drove other women crazy sometimes with her bluntness but that’s what you might expect from an O.R. nurse that was in her own race against time.
Towards the end, she would say she just wanted to do God’s will. She had peace as she reached her end.
Our current healthcare system supports profits for the big pharma companies. There is no punitive system for the AMA blocking approval of treatments using drugs that are off patent.
You can’t cheat death. Grim reaper bats a thousand. He might take a few swings but he gets the home run.
Beware of airports.
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