Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

It's not a rare or unheard of thing for an industry to attack solutions that are significantly better than their own (very profitable) solution.

Psychedelics _can_ permanently fix problems - anxiety, alcoholism, depression - that otherwise would make pharma companies huge amounts of money.

LSD is incredibly cheap to manufacture. There's no patent on it. Same with mushrooms and many others.

Now look at how much money those pharma companies made with Lexapro, with Prozac, with Risperdal. Even when they were caught marketing those drugs for unapproved uses, to children; and caught buying academics opinions, they made billions off the stuff.

Compare the list of side effects on their drugs to mushrooms or LSD. Compare the effectiveness. These companies aren't maintaining huge divisions of PR goons for the fun of it; they absolutely are out there on the internet, lobbying, and on traditional media, convincing people to form opinions like yours.

View on HN

> It's not a rare or unheard of thing for an industry to attack solutions that are significantly better than their own (very profitable) solution

See Juul, attacked by both the smoking industry and anti-smoking lobby. Ecigs don’t have brand loyalty like “Marlboro”—and cigarettes cost only 6 cents a pack to manufacture. So, buy Juul, kill it, preserve the massive profit flow.

Yep. That's a pretty clear example, and it sucks to see people falling for it. Vaping is immediately and obviously far less bad than smoking, but they can't say that. The fear-porn around the issue is wild, and I'm certain legislators and media types are getting brown envelopes to demonize vaping.

Cannabis / hemp would be another. Alcohol giants, cotton, painkillers, and many more have a lot to lose to an alternative that's superior in many ways.

Fossil fuel companies spend huge amounts putting doubt into people's mind about nuclear and renewables, lobbying for themselves, systematically buying academics and news stories.

With the above examples, there are people dying thanks to the PR FUD.

Microsoft did similar stuff, buying and squashing competitors by any means necessary. Even the DoJ had to step in when they tried to own the internet. Some people think MS Office is still around because it's better than the competitors, lol.

Banks lobby to make business as awkward as possible for credit unions.

Bitcoin maxis smear superior tech with the most laughable arguments.

Etc.

Juul was/is a tobacco industry scam to make vaping more accessible and more likely to lead to tobacco addiction.

Juul started with all kinds of flavors, but then they were banned and only tobacco extract flavors were allowed.

Those extracts are more than flavor. They contain the same psychoactives which make tobacco smoking so addictive compared to vaping freebase nicotine — which Juul is not because it is an extract of tobacco nicotine salts to begin with.

This is hmm. Poorly informed.

I use a Juul most of the time to vape. To keep myself in cartridges, I do have to buy the Juul ones, so I get a cart full of the magic Juul juice to keep me company.

Then I refill it a bunch of times with third-party nicotine salts which taste better. It's the same thing basically.

Juul popularized using salts at high concentration with less vapor. That's about it. The rest is good product design and a fad.

There's currently no patent on Lexapro, Prozac, or Risperdal either. "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents.

There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics: https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/psychedelics

And yes, psychedelics have side effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

> "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents.

Bro. They have new drugs that are a molecule different which they sell instead. And your scorn notwithstanding, they do have entire division of goons, whose explicit purpose is to alter opinion online, in academia, in politics, etc.

> There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics

Pfft. Same goes for pharma drugs.

> And yes, psychedelics have side effects:

I didn't say they don't. The side effects are on a different level though.

We're talking about companies that knowingly sold AIDS infected products, among other atrocities. You'd wanna be a little less naive.

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.

But LSD was a "big pharma" solution and Sandoz tried to sell it as a pharmaceutical for at least a decade.

There is a lot of problems with "big pharma" but being against cheap and effective permanent solutions is not one of them, otherwise they wouldn't sell vaccines: many vaccines are cheap, one time use, effective and prevent profitable (?) diseases.

The pharmaceutical industry has ways of making money of cheap and out of patent drugs. For example, by patenting a 0.1% more effective derivative and selling it, or by simply jacking up the price when you are the only one making it (see the Epipen scandal). This, by the way is the problem with the pharmaceutical industry, they spend way too much effort making money with old medicine and finding patentable derivatives than researching new ones. If LSD turned out safe and effective by regulatory agency standards, they will definitely sell it, or maybe some slightly tweaked and patented variant of it.

> There's no patent on it. Same with mushrooms and many others.

https://www.wired.com/story/race-to-engineer-new-psychedelic...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com