Well your point is sound. You can test with chemicals, that’s fine. However, it’s highly politicized and it’s very difficult to get the ability to test the drugs effects on humans. That’s why there are organizations lobbying for it. There is tons of evidence that psychedelics have more success than legal antidepressants, but because that evidence is downplayed it doesn’t get fair shrift. My friend did a study in a drug called Scapalamine which is an Empathetic i.e. it increases ones sensitivity to emotions. (I’m not sure if empathetic is a technical term or whatever but it’s descriptive.) They locked him in these bright institutional hospital rooms, isolated him, and performed pain threshhold tests on him. Certainly SOME information about it’s effects were gleaned, but our society seems to dismiss Timothy Leary’s very sensible approach that involves “Set and Setting” as a very important factor in the effects of a drug.
So you can argue that it is theoretically “possible” to test any drug, the political climate is such that they don’t get their fair shake next to Pharmaceuticals that can be patented by the big Pharma companies. I know loads of people who feel that their lives were significantly enriched by LSD, but they get marginalized, somehow their experience with a drug they may have tried once, or thousands of times is irrelevant, they are a selfish drug addict and their opinion can’t be trusted. Meanwhile, I know very few people that Prozac has helped. The only thing prozac does is subdue your emotions so that you can be cold and mechanical for a while and get your shit together only to have to face up to the emotions eventually. Why is it that drugs that make you numb so you have to put your emotional growth on hold are considered valid, whereas drugs that you could find millions of testimonials in favor of remain illegal? Certainly people go nuts on LSD, but if there were legal therapeutic environments with trained professionals sensitive to the treatment they were administering, how different might it be? One of my best friends wants to be an LSD psychotherapist. She can’t be, so do you know what she does? She uses her law degree from Yale to lobby for a change in the law. So you can argue that it is POSSIBLE to test, but how PROBABLE is it? If it’s so easy to get clinical studies going, then why is it that my friend has to be a lobbyist rather than a psychotherapist like she would like to be?
I might not know every single little fact, and I might get shit wrong once in a while, and I am more than happy to be corrected as you saw, but too often that is used to shoot down the overall premise so that people can go along clinging to the ignorant idea that there is something rational driving the drug war, when there simply isn’t.
Erek