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Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

> For decades, there has been a near complete effective block on medical research for certain classes of drugs.

In the US. One wonders why such a study wasn't carried out in a less puritan country.

It's because the real reason that testing these drugs is illegal isn't USA puritan values/laws. It's because they aren't patented.

The synthetic opioids that drug companies are dumping on the population these days are many times more dangerous, but they make a profit for big companies, so they are legal.

Powerful drug companies influence research worldwide. They want no competition from drugs that would be generic from day one.

edit: missing words

This is a big issue. Clinical studies to get a chemical approved for therapeutical use are very expensive, and since most of the chemicals were first explored a long time ago, they can't be patented anymore, so no pharmaceutical company would fund the studies since they won't be able to be the sole provider of that drug (at a premium cost), and public funding for clinical studies is quite low.

I guess that leaves academia?

No, it does not. "Academia" generally means studies funded by public grants (which, as I said above, very rarely would cover drug approval studies) and in some cases academia might implement studies funded by the pharmaceutical companies, but they're not really an independent source of funding for research, at least not in expensive/labor intensive fields like medicine.

In fields where solid research can't be done by a single part-time person (e.g. a teaching professor), research happens only to the extent and in the direction where there's available funding. Even putting a couple grad students on a project for a year (i.e., a very small project) requires external funding, much less the extensive studies needed to prove that a particular chemical is safe for human use and has a therapeutic effect.

There is nothing stopping them from making a patentable analogue. Happens a lot right now.

Well, except for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

Meh... that already isn't a barrier. Analogues of heroin (fentanyl, etc) are legitimate Rx drugs today.

It’s true in general that economics, with patents being part of that, is the dominant influence on r&d resources.

However the effective research ban is by far the bigger limiting factor in this case, because it rules out most options before even getting started.

For example, it’s not unusual for unpatentable substances to be studied, in the hope that understanding the fundamental mechanism could allow a (sometimes) improved alternative to be developed that could be profitable.

There is also at least some research not controlled by big pharma that could have conceivably targeted these areas 40 years ago.

I have trouble believing the patent argument. If folks can patent certain strains of crop seeds, why would they not be able to patent a GMO mushroom or a process for GMO yeast to produce such things?

Would they not be able to profit from the stability of lab-produced drugs? Would the generic market not want to produce these? After all, some of the drug manufacturers produce both brand-name and generic drugs [1].

Regardless of patent, I'm pretty sure some players would happily get into the prescription market. On top of this, I'm going to guess since it seems some of these drugs out-perform the available prescription drugs and is cheaper in the long run, insurance companies and governments alike (since some places have universal care and even the US is invested in some forms of healthcare) stand to profit from having this sort of thing be the first line of treatment when possible.

[1] http://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurethe...

As I understand it, the problem with drugs that aren't patentable is there is no way for those who pay for clinical testing to re-coup their investment. Phase I-IV clinical testing usually goes well over 100 million USD [1] so drug companies need to recoup that money, if the drug isn't protected under patent, once approved, any manufacturer can produce it. Sure they could patent GMO organism that produces it, but the process to produce it chemically is already well understood, Shulgin has published recipes to produce virtually every psychedelic chemically pure in Pikal and Tikal.

[1]https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/examination-clinical-trial-costs...

Wait, you think drug companies are conspiring to stop MDMA trials?

Having worked for a few drug companies I can assure you most don't even know what MDMA is.

Some of it has to do with the history of psychedelics. At least in the US, the 1960's were rife with "psychedelics cure everything!" and they were pretty broadly used in the psychiatrist community.

What happened was that a lot of the promise of them didn't pan out. Then the laws changed and it made it much harder to do research.

So in essence, it's not just one reason why psychedelic research pretty much disappeared. Unmet expectations, lack of funding and stringent laws all contributed to it.

It pretty much is one reason. Neural networks also fell out of favor in the AI winter, for similar reasons, but people could still experiment (and did) so we now have an NN renaissance.

People could still experiment with schedule 1 drugs. Sure it's a lot of paperwork, but it can be done, in fact this MAPS study proves it!

As a world power and leader of most democratic nations(at the time), sentiments and legislation started in America generally spread to most other nations under its influence.

This is quickly changing.

China doesn't seem too keen on drugs either.

Too true, they’ve been trying to crack down on Ketamine, never mind that it’s medically critical as a field anesthetic!

iirc the united nations ratified american drug laws in the 60s/70s

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