Yeah, when they're trying to criminalise native plants, the whole situation has gotten a bit shark-jumpy.
Absolutely! Australia jumped the drug-shark many years ago.
The alcohol/tobacco/pharmaceutical industries are incredibly powerful here. There interests are enshrined in law.
What benefit would a pharmaceutical company get for suppressing the availability of a potentially profitable pharmaceutical substance?
People have downright asinine and ridiculous notions about how the business of pharmaceutics works.
For example, I've heard countless times from countless fools that 'Big Pharma' (what a stupid-sounding epithet, by the way) is entirely or at least partly responsible for the continuation of the prohibition of medicinal cannabis.
But that makes no sense, if we look at things from the perspective of pharmaceutical companies themselves.
If cannabis (and other medicinally effective natural substances, such as kratom or salvia or iboga or coca or khat), for example, were a veritable gift from God—as many herbalists and advocates of alternative medicines and promoters of snake oils and nostrums so zealously and stridently ballyhoo—then pharmaceutical companies have a significant profit motive to commercialise and legitimise their uses, or at least to use their billions of dollars to bribe governments to approve their therapeutic uses.
That way, 'Big Pharma' could then turn around and use their omnipotent powers of legal dexterity to make themselves and only themselves the sole authorised proprietors, marketers, distributors, manufacturers, and otherwise absolute controllers of these natural drugs.
But wouldn't that not be viable—so says the uninformed oaf— since the unauthorized or unlicensed use of natural drugs, like plants, are difficult to control by dint of their being natural, and thus Big Pharma must suppress them and instead support man-made medicaments that cannot be controlled so less easily?
No. But, why?
Because many synthetic pharmaceuticals, which are already marketed, could theoretically be made by anybody with equal or less difficulty than is involved in the growing of plants.
Growing high-grade cannabis is not significantly more or less difficult than making high-quality sodium oxybate, say. It only seems that way because cannabis is unregulated and criminalised, thus making it more facile for the clandestine greenthumb to grow it.
Why? Because nobody's beating down the doors of cannabis growers for copyright infringement or to serve cease and desist letters. Apparently, breaking prohibition laws is less meaningful than breaking laws that result in a corporation's loss of profits.
The reason plants, fungi, and all other crude (or, euphemistically speaking, 'natural') substances are not used or thought useful as pharmaceuticals is because drug companies (and doctors and nurses, and virtually everybody else) finds it exceeding difficult—if not impossible—to dose and administer drug-containing plants rather than the pure, highly refined elixirs deriving from plants.
For example, opium is no longer used in medicine because its constituents, like morphine or other opiates, are more controllable and more predictable and less bulkier than the opium from which they're phytochemical derivatives.
It gives less to chance and allows more to precision and exactitude to use, say, 5 mg pure morphine than it would to use enough opium to be an equivalent of 5 mg pure morphine. Additionally, the quantity of morphine in opium varies from plant to plant, and determining the exact quantity of morphine per some quantity opium is exceptionally more difficult than it would be to just extract/synthesise the morphine itself.
Also, after one or two plants, everything becomes so unnecessarily time consuming and convoluted that it no longer would work. One becomes forced to either use pure morphine or forget about using morphine entirely.
There is no conspiracy against nature. Moreover, there is no logical basis for there to even exist a conspiracy against nature. It just so happens that what we grow in soil is more imperfect than what we create in science. Period.
A thing isn't necessarily true because more people believe in it.
