I was on various forms of prescribed amphetimines for years and developed paranoia. It took me a few years to somewhat recover. My family has PTSD about that period of my life. I can’t think or communicate well anymore. Fuck that industry.
Funding info is at the bottom of the article, the project was primarily funded by the Swedish government.
> LZ is supported by ìShizu Matsumuraîs Donation (2024-02228) and KI Research Grants (024-02570). LL was supported by the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation (20230452), the Söderström König Foundation, and Fredrik och Ingrid Thurings Stiftelse. BD was supported by a grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). SC, National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) research professor (NIHR303122), is funded by the NIHR for this research project.
It may be none of them. It may be all of them. There could be corruption. There could be subtle manipulation. You have no idea how much money there is in the industry. They make things happen.
Some in the medical profession believe that these abused drugs are safe for their patients. Others know better but they still prescribe them. Some pharmacists will tell you that they’re good for your brain because they increase blood flow, because that’s what they’ve been sold by the reps and the studies they’re fed.
In my experience it's more because the conclusions butt up against the persons personal beliefs or experiences (like OP's)
I knew someone that worked for the tobacco industry where they had labs that constantly were looking for reasons that tobacco was good for you. It meets your qualifications for properly designed studies, but it was purely about trying to convince convinced others that a known addictive substance that caused emphysema and lung cancer was beneficial to your health.
Something similar happened in the weed industry, though it it’s proponents were initially just people that wanted pot to be free for anyone to grow, and then it got taken over by capitalists that didn’t mind using massive amounts of energy to fund vertical gardening, or genetically modify yeast to create THC, or to genetically modify the plant itself to produce an untested derivative of it that would meet the qualifications for hemp products, and then peddle it to teenagers at massive doses without control, pairing it with sugar-free sweeteners and causing serious health problems like uncontrollable vomit coughing, basically inventing a new disease from scratch.
If you're implying publication bias, that's addressed by preregistration, though you either have to be careful about looking it up or else rely on meta-analysis.
Otherwise if they're publishing true results then there you go. Nicotine does have some benefits; it's basically the only effective nootropic and it's pretty effective for schizophrenia which is why almost all schizophrenic people are smokers. Of course the problem is it's super addictive and all the ways of taking it give you cancer.
You probably didn’t mean to add “convinced”.
https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2564674/#:~:text=In...
> massive amounts of energy to fund vertical gardening
You probably instead meant “massive amounts of energy in vertical gardening”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00691-w
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8349047/#:~:text=Ho...
In any case, paranoia is a known potential (but rare) side effect, its not like pharma companies were keeping this a secret.