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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of this discussion is missing the forest for the trees. Here we have people arguing whether it’s better to make powder out of these psychoactive mushrooms and use that as a drug vs extract pure psilocybin and use that as a drug.

I know little of pharmacology but I can see one use of pure compounds: further research. Analyzing how psilocybin affects serotonin receptors could potentially help design other drugs that act on those receptors without psychedelic side effects. It could also help with creating other psilocybin analogs with different effects. And of course having the ability to study in detail the effects that other substances in the psychoactive mushrooms have might help identify other areas of study.

As a software analogy, this is like the debate whether it’s better to have Google Maps vs mapping software and all the underlying data. Of course it’s better to have the latter even if some romanticize the former.

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When "researching cannabis", using just pure thc may not be optimal because cbd, cbn, and other chemicals produce a different kind of high and, if I recall correctly, especially cbd counters some of the most negative effects of thc, etc.

Similarily, people might be worrying about oversimplifying mushrooms to just psilocybin because mushrooms have more than one chemical in them and they might work in a synergistic way as well.

I think you are agreeing with my point: if you can synthesize pure THC you can compare its effects to the cocktail of substances that is cannabis and identify CBD as another active part of the equation. Once you synthesize both you can look for a third, and so on. You can then much more quickly study interactions and combinations. Waiting to genetically create a different combination of all these substances is going to be much slower. Also it allows you to combine them with other substances to study those interactions. Imagine a study of a combination of CBD, a beta blocker, and psilocybin. That would be a difficult thing to do if you start with just the plant material, but easier with pure substances.

> Of course it’s better to have the latter

All other things being equal.

Has OpenStreetMaps made Google Maps disappear?

I think we've had an unintended misunderstanding.

>> As a software analogy, this is like the debate whether it’s better to have Google Maps vs mapping software and all the underlying data. Of course it’s better to have the latter even if some romanticize the former.

> All other things being equal.

More explicitly, my point is that this is only true if all(!) other variables were equal. A variable from TFA that has significant variance is cost. If you're in a hypothetical scenario of choosing between Google Maps (free, or nominal) vs mapping software and all the underlying data ($420 zillion), even though the latter product is preferable, the difference in that one variable could be a deal breaker.

I have no idea what the actual numbers or other particulars are in the real world between OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps, but that they both exist suggests different customers have different requirements (and budgets), and choose the most appropriate technology accordingly.

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