Patent is actually kind of irrelevant here, it's discrete competition. How do you put your fingers into this when it takes all of 3 months to have a lifetime su

Patent is actually kind of irrelevant here, it's discrete competition. How do you put your fingers into this when it takes all of 3 months to have a lifetime supply of therapeutic doses? But it does ostensibly (if effective) curtail sales of pharmaceuticals. The originator pharma companies pay generic mfgs to not manufacture the drugs, ultimately the arrangement is such that both parties profit while maintaining the status quo allowing single-entity control of a given substance - in the US at least, which is the only place any of this matters. Not that that's the case with the previously mentioned medications. Ritchie on his vast tower of scientific conceit totally fails to acknowledge the human element in all of this. These drugs are interesting because of their mechanism, but that mechanism isn't necessarily complimented well by the "therapeutic" setting; the drug in and of itself isn't necessarily the catalytic element, but rather the experience - itself derived from the set and setting: In normal (particularly traditional use) practice it is unheard of to take a bunch of these drugs and hang out in a lab with a bunch of strangers. Anthropology shows us these drugs are uniformally used in group practices with familiars. And this is something noted in the textbooks, you can have internal and external validity - and "internally" yes, it may not look great but that's kinda predictable because it's going to get railroaded into the narrow confines allowed by statistics and ethics. You can on the other hand hop on Erowid and read countless case studies from various perspectives to get a holistic view, but that's not "science" because it has nigh-zero internal validity. But to me that reads as a semantic difference and we could debate it all day - what I think really matters in this case is that in the wild, in real practice, it's efficacious.