How can you define a 'drug'? Nobody knows

"When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he responded: "I know it when I see it." But do we? " from https://history.wustl.edu/i-know-it-when-i-see-it-history-ob...

Kindly expand on this thought please. I heavily disagree with your assertion.

Very well said.

I'll elaborate a little.

>A viable definition should be broad enough to include everything classified as a drug.

Wrong.

Not viable.

As the article implies, you can't get very far with an incorrect assumption, especially with something this admittedly nebulous to explicitly define.

>To get a sense of this “everything”, we used the drug bank compiled by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, which lists more than 16,000 substances.

"Everything" has never been sensible but 16,000 should be good anyway.

I am more familiar with the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR), originally published yearly and containing the details of almost all medications approved by the US FDA at the time. Now available online at https://www.pdr.net

I believe this is a lot fewer than 16,000 materials, but it has always been a very representative example of what medical drugs really are.

>we found three broad ways to define drugs: in terms of what they are, how they work and what they’re used for.

>Unfortunately, none of these options fall within the Goldilocks zone.

Too bad. I guess Goldilocks-style perfection is not to be expected. How they work is actually not very well-known across-the-board anyway, and what they're intended to be used for is not always why they are prescribed. So the best remaining choice is to define them by what they are.

The overwhelming majority of approved compounds are somewhat complex carbon-based chemicals having unique molecular structures, which also contain one or more nitrogen atoms per molecule. This is where so much of the research is concentrated.

Almost all of the approved substances are also toxic to some extent, and subject to undesirable side-effects, as listed for each compound. This is regardless of whether the medication is a natural product or if it is a completely synthetic compound.

Anything not containing a nitrogen atom within the chemical structure, or when non-toxic materials are listed, those are outliers and not representative of what drugs mainly are, even when they are approved as pharmaceuticals, appear in the current listings, and can contribute to a positive treatment outcome. This is a major difference compared to the conventional wisdom. This is so difficult to pin down when I tend to want a narrow focus and be less inclusive of random chemicals and foods, while others may want to classify way more than 16,000 materials as drugs in an attempt to include "everything" imaginable. I guess each person has to decide where they stand for themselves, so you do get to just make this stuff up. Up unitl a few years ago the PDR was still available as a large hardcover reference, a drug dictionary weighing a couple kilos, and I've always looked through it and every now and then you run across a product which I really don't think is a drug drug.

These outliers need to be considered quite differently and on a case-by-case basis compared to the bulk of the drug company offerings. You really don't want this handful of materials to be lumped in with the rest.