10 ms·

The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be

The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful (I'm not talking about label accuracy; I see that as more of a truth-in-labeling issue). To me, cannabis illustrates how absurd the current drug regulation paradigm is. The idea that it would be classified as a Schedule I substance is ridiculous. But to get the FDA to change anything, you have to have people engaging in illegal behavior, to create a demand for specific legislative action about a specific substance, to drive a market for a derivative chemical, to petition to the FDA, to begrudgingly change the scheduling. I've come to the conclusion that drug scheduling and the war on drugs is an economic failure, leads to police abuse and socioeconomic injustices, and acts to reinforce monopolies in the health care market, by ceding power over access to specific providers.

cjmoran 8y ago
Welcome to choir practice, father.
saagarjha 8y ago
> it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful How are you going to stop people from dying when I sell arsenic as a baldness cure?
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  It is not just about harm. FDA rules on medical products also in fitness of purpose. If you can show that your arsenic preparation is effective and safe, it will be allowed on the market. Likewise MDMA preparations and cannabis preparations for specific purposes. (They cannot because it is schedule I. ) DEA governs the drug schedule, not FDA. That should be don from almost strictly criminal point of view, with major politicization.
  - gumby 8y ago
    > It is not just about harm. FDA rules on medical products also in fitness of purpose. This is because most drugs aren't really that good for you, however in the context of some illness, the disease may be worse than the unwanted effects of the drug. A good example is methotrexate (MTX): wow, it really clears up its patients' arthritis, but it's so toxic that it's only administered to patients who are more at risk of dying of cancer than of the MTX. I've appeared before the FDA (in pursuit of drug approval) and in my experience they're actually more than fair. The biggest problem is the assholes who try to game the system, which just gums up the works for everyone. edit: I'm no longer in that biz so have nothing to gain by praising or condemning the FDA. The approval process is far from perfect but I honestly think it's pretty good overall.
  - tssva 8y ago
    Technically the DEA doesn't control the drug schedule either. Under the Controlled Substance Act the Attorney General controls the scheduling of drugs. Attorney General's have delegated this responsibility to the DEA but could reassign it to any part of the DoJ at anytime or choose to override any decision of the DEA.
- vkou 8y ago
  He's going to wait for a bunch of people to die, start a class action lawsuit, spend the next ten to fifteen years researching and litigating to determine whether or not arsenic does, in fact, cause cancer, and then, tens of millions of dollars and thousands of lives later, let a dozen people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty make that determination. Best case-for-the-public scenario, he's going to end up paying a fine to the government, that will be used to advertise the dangers of arsenic, and will be given retroactive immunity to any new class action lawsuits. The only way that he will be able to pay that fine, will be by continuing to selling arsenic to the public, killing thousands more. If that seems too outlandish, may I direct you to tobacco trials? [1] Legal, until proven harmful turned out absolutely great there! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
- str8logic 8y ago
  by vetting the supplier...you may not pass given this public statement ;)
- 0xTJ 8y ago
  I'm fairly sure that arsenic is known to be harmful.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Pick something else then. Say I come up with a new chemical which ends up being toxic but I sell it anyways.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  Education?
- spruciefic399 8y ago
  People drink bleach to cure autism. Should we ban bleach? First, there's a difference between allowing the sale and distribution of a substance at all and selling it with a claim. All I would say is that [almost?] no substance's sale should be banned. Maybe taxed or something. Second, this is going to sound harsh to some, but I think at some point, if someone buys arsenic to cure baldness, it's their responsibility. It's fairly common for people to seek expert advice on something not because it's legally mandated, but because there is a culture and individual understanding that something is outside of your ability/skill to do without severe negative consequences. I have someone else do my taxes because I don't want to screw something up. You can represent yourself in a court of law, but in most/many cases it's inadvisable. If I need to have certain things done on my house, I hire an expert because I don't want to cause damage and/or injury. I think a similar cultural norm needs to exist regarding substances and health care more broadly. To me there's something fundamentally illogical about the current approach to drugs, because if taken to its logical conclusion, it involves banning people from purchasing any substance unless they have appropriate credentials. The government just allows exceptions to the logic (e.g, alcohol, household chemicals, etc.) because to enforce it would lead to a lot of uproar. That seems really legally unsound to me. The more sound approach would look totally different.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > People drink bleach to cure autism. Should we ban bleach? No, but we should stop anyone from trying to sell bleach as an autism cure.
pjc50 8y ago
The EU chemicals directive (REACH) actually goes the other way: you have to at least perform a safety assessment on everything you want to sell or include in a product. The problem is that cannabis was never shown to be more harmful than tobacco scientifically in the first place, but the public and politicians were led to believe that it was. By the 1950s equivalents of "fake news". You can see a similar "manufacture of risk" process going on with vaccines at the moment, which is very dangerous. It's also routine for the UK press to engage in ridiculously exaggerated anti-drugs campaigning, as it fits their sensational moralistic worldview. Arguably more of a problem is the "we know this has risks but we can't feasibly ban it" category: alcohol.
- GordonS 8y ago
  The situation in the UK with regards to cannabis is ridiculous - politicians and hate-spewing rags such as the Daily Mail have people believing all sorts of falsehoods that harm campaigns for legality. The nonsensical reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug - despite expert recommendations - has also done a lot of harm. There are some recent signs that expensive, synthetic cannabinoid-based drugs may get licensed here for an extremely limited set of medical circumstances, but I can't see British politicians going any further than that within my lifetime. The pace of change with regards to drug policy is maddeningly slow.
  - shawabawa3 8y ago
    I often think about what would have happened if the Lib Dems didn't commit political suicide by going back on their single biggest campaign promise (by tripling tuition fees) They're pro-legalisation, and if they still had 60+ seats in parliament they could be making real progress towards at least decriminalisation (probably under a labour coalition)
    - merinowool 8y ago
      They are not pro-legalisation. They had a drug minister who did nothing to ease prohibition. I don't believe anything they say, they have lost any credibility they had.
drawkbox 8y ago
The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. The problem is that once drugs get classified as a controlled substance, it is very difficult to get them out because neither the public nor legislature can easily remove it. The CSA list is managed entirely wrong. The CSA was setup to target certain dissidents initially by Nixon, it is nearly criminal that the drug war is ran by an organization that is untouchable and maintained by the enforcer. The CSA should be completely abolished or recreated with expiring classifications, and the FDA can make recommendations on safety but then it is up to the people to decide. We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one.
- is_this_valid2 8y ago
  > The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. The Controlled Substances Act has multiple flaws. For one, the CSA explicitly grants different rights to different people on the basis of disability; which is not equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" is etched across the US Federal Supreme Court Building. The US (and now Vietnam) Declarations of Independence read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Controlled Substances Act is predicated upon flawed logic: in order to prove a universal quantification ("it doesn't help anyone") one must show that for person in all_people: for condition in all_conditions: doesnt_help_with(x, person, condition; which is impossible when you're not an agency that funds drug research on all people with all conditions. A single counterexample (an existential quantification) disproves a universal quantification. Maybe computers and radar required logic skills that would've gone into law. Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights. Furthermore, does the Constitution grant legislators the right to grant right-granting privileges to non-legislators? > Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. One epidemiological statistic which could be used as a threshold is called "Margin of Exposure" (MOE). If alcohol sets that standard for legal dangerousness, most other substances are not too dangerous for persons with rights to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. > We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one. Alcohol Prohibition required a Constitutional Amendment; the Commerce Clause was already in place at the time and yet they felt that the Constitution did not enumerate the power to ban alcohol. Regarding a person's liberty over their own body and mind: liberty is a natural inalienable right. As is pursuit of happiness. A person can go buy, say, a chainsaw, and on their own property intentionally remove a limb while holding an apple in their mouth to be shot with flaming arrows on live television, and the government claims no loss; indeed the government has no right to claim loss due to dangerous acts entered into by citizens which do not infringe the rights of others. More notes on the substance abuse problem and the other problems (e.g. human trafficking) it's complicitly creating: https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty It's good to see that the FDA recognized the medical utility of CBD. Rescheduling or descheduling would be great for research.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
The general consensus on Hacker News is that drugs are banned as a method of control over undesirable populations, rather than out of any real concern for people's health. Undoubtedly, someone will reply to your comment with the quote from Nixon's advisor about how they invented the war on drugs to target the antiwar left and black people.
- jacobush 8y ago
  You don't agree?
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I largely agree with the consensus, although I can see how my comment may have been dismissive of that. I'm pro-legalisation (or at minimum decriminalisation) for all recreational drugs and I believe the War on Drugs has been a complete and unmitigated failure in its stated goals. But I don't think it's the only reason that recreational drugs were banned and have been kept banned. My other theory on why prohibition is popular is due to conservative Protestants believing that mind altering substances are immoral. I've encountered a lot of people who are against recreational drugs for the very fact that they are recreational (while hypocritically still enjoying alcohol).
- pjc50 8y ago
  This comes up a lot. While it works as an explanation for the US, it's an international issue; it's not one of those things where the US does it differently without realising. What happens is usually a mix of factors. Drugs aren't purely harmless, you can certainly find a few people who've been harmed directly and a larger group of people whose use is problematic. This creates a demand for Something To Be done. This falls down on comparisons with alcohol and tobacco - both of which are widely legal and have their own temperance movements, but haven't quite succeeded in a total ban yet. America (and a few other places) actually did have a War On Booze, they just gave up because it's too socially normalised. Only the more extreme Islamic countries manage official temperance, and even there it's widely violated.
richardthered 8y ago
> The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful The problem with this approach is that it would lead to a proliferation of snake-oil salesmen. If the effort to create a new 'drug' is trivial, but the study on efficacy/harm is long and expensive, then there would be a huge number of snake-oil offerings. Take colored water, slap a 'it cures cancer' sticker on it, and start selling it the public. In a couple of years, once there are studies showing that it's just colored water, and does nothing, just shut down the product and make a new one. The regulatory/safety efforts would never be able to keep up.
- juliangoldsmith 8y ago
  Snake oil already seems to be a problem, with CBD oil. A nurse I know told me about a woman who had been treating her breast cancer with CBD oil, convinced that CBD cures cancer. She finally went to the hospital when her entire breast became necrotic, and died not long after that.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    Issues today include snakeoil salesmen, but something else too. Maybe you would call it fad folk medicine. Snakeoil without the salesmen. People writing and sharing elaborate health advice not for profit (maybe for clicks) having little or no connection to science.
    - tcj_phx 8y ago
      Conventional doctors still prescribe premarin, as if horse urine still has therapeutic value. Premarin == PREgnant MAre's uRINe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens The tragedy of this situation is that physiologists have actually figured out a lot about the hormones since premarin was released. But horse urine is still a big business for the drug industry, even after the Women's Health Initiative was shut down early... 10 minutes appointments (edit: and symptomatic prescriptions) aren't long enough to drill down to the root of a patient's symptoms.
sandworm101 8y ago
For all the talk, the classification of drugs is not a purely scientific decision. It is, at least in part, a reflection of agreed societal norms. Those norms are expressed through the elected government, who in turn control many strings within the FDA. There are solid scientific arguments to reclassify many things but don't expect that to mean anything to the political appointee who has to sign the document. Question: Is there a medical use for alcohol? I mean drinking the stuff, not as a disinfectant. I read lots of stuff about uses for LSD and pot in therapy. Is anyone using/studying alcohol?
wnmurphy 8y ago
Consider the same rationale for security: let's allow any user to do anything with our ecosystem, unless we know them to be malevolent. I'd argue that the human body is a lot more worthy of defending than a cloud platform. I'm totally fine with a whitelist model. Cannabis was a fluke; legislation was pushed through by a political opportunist despite the AMA pointing out that there was no evidence of harm caused by cannabis. The regulation model in itself is fine, we just need to take the people out of the decision making. :-)

cjmoran 8y ago

Welcome to choir practice, father.

saagarjha 8y ago

> it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful How are you going to stop people from dying when I sell arsenic as a baldness cure?

AstralStorm 8y ago
It is not just about harm. FDA rules on medical products also in fitness of purpose. If you can show that your arsenic preparation is effective and safe, it will be allowed on the market. Likewise MDMA preparations and cannabis preparations for specific purposes. (They cannot because it is schedule I. ) DEA governs the drug schedule, not FDA. That should be don from almost strictly criminal point of view, with major politicization.
- gumby 8y ago
  > It is not just about harm. FDA rules on medical products also in fitness of purpose. This is because most drugs aren't really that good for you, however in the context of some illness, the disease may be worse than the unwanted effects of the drug. A good example is methotrexate (MTX): wow, it really clears up its patients' arthritis, but it's so toxic that it's only administered to patients who are more at risk of dying of cancer than of the MTX. I've appeared before the FDA (in pursuit of drug approval) and in my experience they're actually more than fair. The biggest problem is the assholes who try to game the system, which just gums up the works for everyone. edit: I'm no longer in that biz so have nothing to gain by praising or condemning the FDA. The approval process is far from perfect but I honestly think it's pretty good overall.
- tssva 8y ago
  Technically the DEA doesn't control the drug schedule either. Under the Controlled Substance Act the Attorney General controls the scheduling of drugs. Attorney General's have delegated this responsibility to the DEA but could reassign it to any part of the DoJ at anytime or choose to override any decision of the DEA.
vkou 8y ago
He's going to wait for a bunch of people to die, start a class action lawsuit, spend the next ten to fifteen years researching and litigating to determine whether or not arsenic does, in fact, cause cancer, and then, tens of millions of dollars and thousands of lives later, let a dozen people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty make that determination. Best case-for-the-public scenario, he's going to end up paying a fine to the government, that will be used to advertise the dangers of arsenic, and will be given retroactive immunity to any new class action lawsuits. The only way that he will be able to pay that fine, will be by continuing to selling arsenic to the public, killing thousands more. If that seems too outlandish, may I direct you to tobacco trials? [1] Legal, until proven harmful turned out absolutely great there! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
str8logic 8y ago
by vetting the supplier...you may not pass given this public statement ;)
0xTJ 8y ago
I'm fairly sure that arsenic is known to be harmful.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Pick something else then. Say I come up with a new chemical which ends up being toxic but I sell it anyways.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
Education?
spruciefic399 8y ago
People drink bleach to cure autism. Should we ban bleach? First, there's a difference between allowing the sale and distribution of a substance at all and selling it with a claim. All I would say is that [almost?] no substance's sale should be banned. Maybe taxed or something. Second, this is going to sound harsh to some, but I think at some point, if someone buys arsenic to cure baldness, it's their responsibility. It's fairly common for people to seek expert advice on something not because it's legally mandated, but because there is a culture and individual understanding that something is outside of your ability/skill to do without severe negative consequences. I have someone else do my taxes because I don't want to screw something up. You can represent yourself in a court of law, but in most/many cases it's inadvisable. If I need to have certain things done on my house, I hire an expert because I don't want to cause damage and/or injury. I think a similar cultural norm needs to exist regarding substances and health care more broadly. To me there's something fundamentally illogical about the current approach to drugs, because if taken to its logical conclusion, it involves banning people from purchasing any substance unless they have appropriate credentials. The government just allows exceptions to the logic (e.g, alcohol, household chemicals, etc.) because to enforce it would lead to a lot of uproar. That seems really legally unsound to me. The more sound approach would look totally different.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > People drink bleach to cure autism. Should we ban bleach? No, but we should stop anyone from trying to sell bleach as an autism cure.

pjc50 8y ago

The EU chemicals directive (REACH) actually goes the other way: you have to at least perform a safety assessment on everything you want to sell or include in a product. The problem is that cannabis was never shown to be more harmful than tobacco scientifically in the first place, but the public and politicians were led to believe that it was. By the 1950s equivalents of "fake news". You can see a similar "manufacture of risk" process going on with vaccines at the moment, which is very dangerous. It's also routine for the UK press to engage in ridiculously exaggerated anti-drugs campaigning, as it fits their sensational moralistic worldview. Arguably more of a problem is the "we know this has risks but we can't feasibly ban it" category: alcohol.

GordonS 8y ago
The situation in the UK with regards to cannabis is ridiculous - politicians and hate-spewing rags such as the Daily Mail have people believing all sorts of falsehoods that harm campaigns for legality. The nonsensical reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug - despite expert recommendations - has also done a lot of harm. There are some recent signs that expensive, synthetic cannabinoid-based drugs may get licensed here for an extremely limited set of medical circumstances, but I can't see British politicians going any further than that within my lifetime. The pace of change with regards to drug policy is maddeningly slow.
- shawabawa3 8y ago
  I often think about what would have happened if the Lib Dems didn't commit political suicide by going back on their single biggest campaign promise (by tripling tuition fees) They're pro-legalisation, and if they still had 60+ seats in parliament they could be making real progress towards at least decriminalisation (probably under a labour coalition)
  - merinowool 8y ago
    They are not pro-legalisation. They had a drug minister who did nothing to ease prohibition. I don't believe anything they say, they have lost any credibility they had.

drawkbox 8y ago

The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. The problem is that once drugs get classified as a controlled substance, it is very difficult to get them out because neither the public nor legislature can easily remove it. The CSA list is managed entirely wrong. The CSA was setup to target certain dissidents initially by Nixon, it is nearly criminal that the drug war is ran by an organization that is untouchable and maintained by the enforcer. The CSA should be completely abolished or recreated with expiring classifications, and the FDA can make recommendations on safety but then it is up to the people to decide. We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one.

is_this_valid2 8y ago
> The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. The Controlled Substances Act has multiple flaws. For one, the CSA explicitly grants different rights to different people on the basis of disability; which is not equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" is etched across the US Federal Supreme Court Building. The US (and now Vietnam) Declarations of Independence read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Controlled Substances Act is predicated upon flawed logic: in order to prove a universal quantification ("it doesn't help anyone") one must show that for person in all_people: for condition in all_conditions: doesnt_help_with(x, person, condition; which is impossible when you're not an agency that funds drug research on all people with all conditions. A single counterexample (an existential quantification) disproves a universal quantification. Maybe computers and radar required logic skills that would've gone into law. Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights. Furthermore, does the Constitution grant legislators the right to grant right-granting privileges to non-legislators? > Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. One epidemiological statistic which could be used as a threshold is called "Margin of Exposure" (MOE). If alcohol sets that standard for legal dangerousness, most other substances are not too dangerous for persons with rights to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. > We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one. Alcohol Prohibition required a Constitutional Amendment; the Commerce Clause was already in place at the time and yet they felt that the Constitution did not enumerate the power to ban alcohol. Regarding a person's liberty over their own body and mind: liberty is a natural inalienable right. As is pursuit of happiness. A person can go buy, say, a chainsaw, and on their own property intentionally remove a limb while holding an apple in their mouth to be shot with flaming arrows on live television, and the government claims no loss; indeed the government has no right to claim loss due to dangerous acts entered into by citizens which do not infringe the rights of others. More notes on the substance abuse problem and the other problems (e.g. human trafficking) it's complicitly creating: https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty It's good to see that the FDA recognized the medical utility of CBD. Rescheduling or descheduling would be great for research.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

The general consensus on Hacker News is that drugs are banned as a method of control over undesirable populations, rather than out of any real concern for people's health. Undoubtedly, someone will reply to your comment with the quote from Nixon's advisor about how they invented the war on drugs to target the antiwar left and black people.

jacobush 8y ago
You don't agree?
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  I largely agree with the consensus, although I can see how my comment may have been dismissive of that. I'm pro-legalisation (or at minimum decriminalisation) for all recreational drugs and I believe the War on Drugs has been a complete and unmitigated failure in its stated goals. But I don't think it's the only reason that recreational drugs were banned and have been kept banned. My other theory on why prohibition is popular is due to conservative Protestants believing that mind altering substances are immoral. I've encountered a lot of people who are against recreational drugs for the very fact that they are recreational (while hypocritically still enjoying alcohol).
pjc50 8y ago
This comes up a lot. While it works as an explanation for the US, it's an international issue; it's not one of those things where the US does it differently without realising. What happens is usually a mix of factors. Drugs aren't purely harmless, you can certainly find a few people who've been harmed directly and a larger group of people whose use is problematic. This creates a demand for Something To Be done. This falls down on comparisons with alcohol and tobacco - both of which are widely legal and have their own temperance movements, but haven't quite succeeded in a total ban yet. America (and a few other places) actually did have a War On Booze, they just gave up because it's too socially normalised. Only the more extreme Islamic countries manage official temperance, and even there it's widely violated.

richardthered 8y ago

> The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful The problem with this approach is that it would lead to a proliferation of snake-oil salesmen. If the effort to create a new 'drug' is trivial, but the study on efficacy/harm is long and expensive, then there would be a huge number of snake-oil offerings. Take colored water, slap a 'it cures cancer' sticker on it, and start selling it the public. In a couple of years, once there are studies showing that it's just colored water, and does nothing, just shut down the product and make a new one. The regulatory/safety efforts would never be able to keep up.

juliangoldsmith 8y ago
Snake oil already seems to be a problem, with CBD oil. A nurse I know told me about a woman who had been treating her breast cancer with CBD oil, convinced that CBD cures cancer. She finally went to the hospital when her entire breast became necrotic, and died not long after that.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Issues today include snakeoil salesmen, but something else too. Maybe you would call it fad folk medicine. Snakeoil without the salesmen. People writing and sharing elaborate health advice not for profit (maybe for clicks) having little or no connection to science.
  - tcj_phx 8y ago
    Conventional doctors still prescribe premarin, as if horse urine still has therapeutic value. Premarin == PREgnant MAre's uRINe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens The tragedy of this situation is that physiologists have actually figured out a lot about the hormones since premarin was released. But horse urine is still a big business for the drug industry, even after the Women's Health Initiative was shut down early... 10 minutes appointments (edit: and symptomatic prescriptions) aren't long enough to drill down to the root of a patient's symptoms.

sandworm101 8y ago

For all the talk, the classification of drugs is not a purely scientific decision. It is, at least in part, a reflection of agreed societal norms. Those norms are expressed through the elected government, who in turn control many strings within the FDA. There are solid scientific arguments to reclassify many things but don't expect that to mean anything to the political appointee who has to sign the document. Question: Is there a medical use for alcohol? I mean drinking the stuff, not as a disinfectant. I read lots of stuff about uses for LSD and pot in therapy. Is anyone using/studying alcohol?

wnmurphy 8y ago

Consider the same rationale for security: let's allow any user to do anything with our ecosystem, unless we know them to be malevolent. I'd argue that the human body is a lot more worthy of defending than a cloud platform. I'm totally fine with a whitelist model. Cannabis was a fluke; legislation was pushed through by a political opportunist despite the AMA pointing out that there was no evidence of harm caused by cannabis. The regulation model in itself is fine, we just need to take the people out of the decision making. :-)