In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.

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Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors.

Our ability to synthesize new compounds has also exploded since then. Drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster drug. They don’t need to use psilocybin. We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly. There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.

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ux266478 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.

Except the ligands matter, binding site is massively important to drug design. As is the behavior of the molecule beyond that. A 5HT2A agonist that's also an irreversible and potent dopamine agonist is obviously a non-starter. Minor modifications of a molecule produce wildly different and very unpredictable effects. Pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics are the bottleneck of drug research, and they take quite a lot of work to understand.

> We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly.

"Research chemical" is common parlance, and it's synonymous with "dangerous gutter drug" because you end up with nasty little molecules like what's found in the 25-NB or FLY families, or something like MDMB-CHMNACA. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Our algorithmic and predictive power in pharmacology is one of the absolute worst out of all the sciences. The absolute state of this naive futurist mindset that we can move fast in drug research is absolutely horrifying to even suggest. That's not where the state of the art is, and I'd put big money on us not getting there for another 100k years or so.

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tim-star 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

certainly you should understand the context of the comment then- the commenter was saying we had a 40 year moratorium on research because of the governments decisions at the time. There is a lot of research again now, but research takes time.

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new-treatment 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very notably Definium Therapeutics (Formerly MindMed) has synthesized an orally disintegrating LSD pill. Given almost zero historical toxicity, I think it is mostly stuck in some societal acceptance limbo for this class of meds. Strange if one sees how openly accepted THC/etc are

	▲	ifwinterco 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Acid is always orally active and tabs are tiny, it being hard to administer was never the issue