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Comment by robbs | Hacker News Reader

Caffeine is an example. Coffee and energy drinks are doing well I'd say.

Caffeine is grandfathered in as a Generally Recognized as Safe food additive. If energy drink companies had to go through clinical trials with no patent protection for each drink formula, they wouldn't make them.

Why was caffeine studied? Why does it continue to be studied?

It’s a lot cheaper to study something in academia than to do a full clinical trial.

The global coffee market is worth $138 billion, the soft drink industry is $556 billion (and growing). The vast majority of which being caffeinated. Starbucks the company is #116 on the Fortune 500 and #1 in food services. There's sufficient economic activity to warrant continued research in the area.

I think the current regulatory regime in many US states allows companies to make a killing off of selling naturally occurring bioactive substances as dietary supplements with few regulatory hurdles.

Kratom, CBD, and delta-8 THC are naturally occurring bioactive substances that are newer to the US market. Both have carved out a pretty nice economic niche with a bunch of claimed health benefits.

A couple of years back, I saw a sign outside a fancy legal highs shop in Fishtown, Philadelphia touting the benefits of kratom as a pre-workout supplement. The insanity that a business was advertising an addictive opioid to healthy, opioid-naive people for better gains in the gym almost makes me want more regulation in this area.

Your point is a bit undermined by the fact that two out of your three examples are cannabis extracts, where cannabis proper - literally a leaf - is still very much illegal and has to be "laundered" through chemical processes to make it less fun and therefore "medicine" instead of "recreational drugs".

I think your point and mine can both be true at the same time. Cannabis is the subject of a past regulatory regime that restricted nearly all psychoactive substances popular at the time (natural or synthetic). The actions of that regime do not go away when the zeitgeist changes. The current regulatory regime is much more dovish, and that is visible in the difference between the controlled status of chemicals that became popular recently versus similar ones that were popular 50 years ago.

Isn't it relatively easy to sell anything "naturally occurring" as a supplement? I think there is very little regulation (of course if you want to claim it's a drug and presumably charge much more for it it's another matter).

Even synthetic research chemicals are generally legal as long as you add a "not for human consumption" label (and they aren't explicitly banned or analogous to other illegal/regulated drugs).

That’s an excellent point

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