[SecondHandTofu]

An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.

[rubyfan]

Yes and the fact that you have people looking for a cure to their ills will always draw unscrupulous parties to their money. The entire supplements industry is sort of a prototype for this with outrageous marketing often targeting vulnerable groups. I’d argue the professional marketing of unregulated substances makes the supplements industry a lot larger than it might organically be.

[adrianN]

PCPs don’t have the capacity to follow all medical research either. They depend on a network of institutions and regulation to do their work. How do you propose to scale that without the bureaucracy?

[SecondHandTofu]

I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.

I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit. At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.

All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!

Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.