> 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.

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.

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.

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

On one hand, I understand that psychedelics should be more studied than they currently are. On the other hand, I understand why they were originally banned. In a country that valued a monoculture and having a single way of life, psychedelics spurred a complete revolution with regards to social and cultural norms. It was seen as destabilizing, and a threat to the American way of life.

Nowadays, our country is very different. There is a widespread sense that there is no right or wrong way to live your life, and anyone who goes against multiculturalist viewpoints is labeled as ignorant or a racist. I think in this environment, the introspective, antiauthoritarian thought processes that psychedelic use brings about wouldn't have nearly the kind of social impact that they had in the 70's.

> There is a widespread sense that there is no right or wrong way to live your life, and anyone who goes against multiculturalist viewpoints is labeled as ignorant or a racist.

Incredibly reductionist. There is no such thing as "no right or wrong way" everyone either chooses a way or falls into a default way of living. Everyone ought to get more introspective and conscious about their philosophies and assumptions.

We have built a saturated information dystopia, taking time away from it to focus on the self is even more important and impactful.

"We have built a saturated information dystopia, taking time away from it to focus on the self is even more important and impactful."

This quote will stick with me for years to come. Cheers.

Keep in mind that banning these drugs for personal consumption wasn’t nearly the intellectual crime that banning the research has been.

Substances have been banned in cultures for thousands of years. In the US - long before psychedelics came under scrutiny - opium, cocaine, and other drugs had been made illegal, but not before the 60s was actual basic research by scientists and physicians also banned.

"opium, cocaine, and other drugs had been made illegal"

FYI, opium and cocaine were banned for overtly racist reasons:

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fie...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-o...

So I am not sure those are the best examples to prove the point that banning drug research is a greater crime than banning recreational drugs.

Was the threat to the traditional American way of life really the reason they were made illegal? It seems more likely that it was due to the unknown and possibly dangerous nature of the drugs. As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception (aside from alcohol).

"As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception"

Actually, in America nationwide drug laws began in the 20th century, and it had nothing to do with health or unknown effects. Opium was outlawed as part of a general effort to "protect America" from Chinese immigrants. Heroin was outlawed because a German company held a patent on it. Cocaine was outlawed because, according to the people in Congress at the time, it drove black men crazy and made it impossible to kill them with standard police-issue sidearms (also, according to an article from the New York Times just before cocaine was banned, Jews were selling it). Marijuana prohibition was principally driven by racism and as a form of regulatory capture by industries that competed with hemp.

LSD was discovered decades before it was outlawed and the effects were well understood before it was banned. LSD happens to be one of the safest recreational drugs; in fact, the biggest danger is the poorly regulated supply chain i.e. most "LSD" on the market today is not actually LSD (as with most drugs, the ban poses a greater health risk than the drug itself). The government conducted its own extremely unethical LSD study to determine if it could be used as a mind control drug (it cannot) and knew the safety profile long before the ban. LSD was banned because of concerns that it was contributing to the moral corruption of American youth (i.e. think of all those white teenagers out partying with hippies); in other words, it was viewed as a threat to the prevailing social order (probably not a coincidence that this coincided with the civil rights movement, which was a direct challenge to that social order).

"LSD happens to be one of the safest recreational drugs"

Purely anecdotal, but have you ever met someone that has taken large doses of LSD over the course of a few years? They are almost always permanently changed

I don't think there's a firm consensus on the reasoning, but it's generally acknowledged that the Sch. 1 classification of the psychedelics was motivated to 1) quell their threat of cultural and political destabilization and 2) to keep hippies and blacks in check. The 60s were similar to Occupy Wall Street: there's major (valid) fear on the part of the establishment when a radically different movement picks up steam. Psychedelics were (rightly) considered a partial fuel to the new movement.

I also agree that the U.S. is much less of a monoculture now and people generally agree that others should be able to live, think, and believe whatever and however they want.

>there's major (valid) fear on the part of the establishment when a radically different movement picks up steam

What do you mean by "valid" here? Do you mean they are afraid for society, or themselves?

As in, there was a legitimate possibility in the 60s or with OWS that the movement would pick up enough momentum to really shake things up, power-structure-wise.

Don't forget that the civil rights movement actually was shaking things up in the 60s. I suspect that influenced political decisions by magnifying perceived threats to the prevailing social order.

I agree, but we must remove all government social programs as well to make that dream come true. You can't have one group experimenting at the expense of another.

>It seems more likely that it was due to the unknown and possibly dangerous nature of the drugs.

The benign physical effects of plants like cannabis were well established by the government's own studies. The science was purposefully ignored because it did not align with the political goals of the Nixon administration.

Safety played absolutely no role in these decisions. If that we’re the case, only personal consumption or distribution would be banned, not basic research itself including research that didn’t even administer the drugs to humans.

There's also an article from someone high up (sorry I'm not being more specific) in the government/presidency of the 60s who said the main reason for the drug laws was so they could lock up lots of African Americans

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...

Both marijuana and heroin were illegal long before Nixon was president.

Well it was known as a powerful mind-altering substance in the 50's when it was released as a medication, yet was kept on the market because it was seen as a breakthrough with alcoholism, PTSD, and other mental health issues. It wasn't actually made illegal until the 70's when its use became widespread in the growing counterculture. That makes me believe that the counterculture had a large part of it being banned.

The sad thing is that the repressed authoritarians who want to control everyone and prohibit drug use would likely benefit greatly from some recreational psychotropic experiences under the right conditions. And society would be better off as well for their experience.

Or maybe they're wound too tightly, I could be wildly optimistic.

You're confusing the public-facing values authoritarians claim to have vs what they actually believe.

They use things like religion, scapegoats, and wars (on drugs, terrorism, communism, etc) to whip up support. But it's just a tool. Absolute power for themselves is all they believe in. Many of them are drug users, I'm sure.

>Many of them are drug users, I'm sure.

I should have specified a psychedelic or empathogenic drug I guess. You're probably right that they're knee-deep in depressants and stimulants.

>and even work against collection of, objective data

The problem is that many times the data collected is not objective at all. Statistics can be twisted by even just the definitions of words used. For example, a CDC study on rape considered forced penetration, but not being forced to penetrate, as rape. This data was then used in a report that, among other conclusions, concluded that women almost never rape men. All the cases of women forcing a man to have sex were defined as not being rape, twisting the results of the study.

When you see someone against data collection, are they against using good objective data, or do they have reason to believe the data won't be objective and manipulated to push one side or the other?

All this being said, I think drugs like MDMA should be legal for recreational use, much less therapeutic use.

>The problem is that many times the data collected is not objective at all

I don’t think that has anything to do with it. If it were the case the demands would be for better data, not no data.

And yes, some in Congress advocate against collecting data full stop on certain issues.

I would agree it’s always been true thst data will sometimes be flawed and biased, and always will be.

The question is what do you do about it? Stop science, or improve standards in good faith?

It depends upon what the options are. If you can demand and get good data, then people will ask for good data. If they don't think it is possible to get good data, then they may demand no data because no data is better than bad data.

For an extreme example, consider a country where homosexuality is punished by long prison sentences (or worse). Would you trust any data that such a government produced? If they produced data showing something negative about homosexuality, would you even spend the time to look at their methodologies? Or would it be dismissed as inherently biased as the source would be seen as being incapable of being trusted? For me it would be the latter.

>"So many people wonder when science will let us do things. When will we land on the moon, when will we cure cancer (most cancer anyway, a handful have been effectively cured), when will all of mankind benefit from the next great insights? We ask this yet in a lot of ways, we won’t even open our minds enough to give it our best shot."

I'm of the firm opinion that we'll always be slow to do those Big Things while we are dragged-down by the welfare/nanny state. So many lives and generations are subsidized into oblivion for a net societal loss.