From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 19:21:15 MST
On Thu, 6 Mar 2003 17:12:52 -0800, Ramez Naam <mez@apexnano.com> wrote:
> There's no market incentive in the black market to discover new drugs.
> As a matter of custom, those who develop new psychedelic drugs release
> their chemical structures and synthesis steps into the public domain.
Well, there used to be one: life used to parallel art, where Burgess (in _A
Clockwork Orange_) and Brunner (in _Stand on Zanzibar_) wrote about
"designer drugs" before the term existed.
The notion was that new drugs could proliferate faster than laws could be
passed to specify them as unlawful. Depending on which sources you credit,
that might have been happening in the late 1970s-early 1980s. So you
couldn't be busted for possession, or possession with intent to distribute,
etc. "Oh this? It's a cleaning compound."
US law changed in 1986 to outlaw substances that _acted like_ already-
outlawed substances or "resembled" them in chemical structure, which,
depending on one's views, either closed a horrible loophole or popped open
fresh floodgates of opression. In particular, some find it troublesome that
substances that naturally occur in every human brain cause Federal
conniptions if they're found on the wrong person's shelf.
> Even if they didn't, there would be no effective way to protect a
> patent on an illegal substance.
True, but other traditional criminal market controls still have effect.
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