>> As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens.
Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.
I can't help but notice that this is basically how we got oxycodone, and even stronger opioids such as fentanyl. Would the opiod crisis have been so extreme if the hardest stuff you could get was raw opium? Not that opium's not a hell of a drug itself, but as I understand it, the risks of serious health issues like fatal overdose are not as high compared to synthetic opiates. Jeet Thayil's semi-autobiographical novel Narcopolis touches on this. Set in Bombay, the opium-addicted characters run into problems when dealers start switch from selling opium to heroin.
I'm not sure how this might play out for psychedelics, which are generally not addictive, but the incentives are similar. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, in fact I'm excited to see where those incentives lead things. Will researchers invent a hangover free ecstasy? Acid you can drive to work on? Lovely.
This may be somewhat difficult, however, given the prior art of Shulgin and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL. TIHKAL and PIHKAL cover a lot of ground.
The problem is not that we lack patent unencumbered medicine, the problem is that only patent encumbered medicine has the incentives behind it to fund studies into its safety, and the rest of the FDA process.
Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.