I think we should test on humans who are facing life in prison.
^ This.
Erm ... what about all the innocent people who are facing life in prison (as made evident by DNA exoneration, etc.)?
I'm pretty damned sure "just legalizing" currently illegal drugs is not an avenue that's been overlooked.
Time will tell, but with so little information I can only guess that the whole point of doing this, from the perspective of the New Zealand government, is to, as quickly as possible, lure as many would-be legal drug profiteers as possible into paying millions for tests whose criteria will ultimately disqualify all or most of the submissions from entering the market (fast money). If they're not willing to legalize and regulate cannabis, given all we know about its relative safety profile, how much of a miracle is it going to take for some random new synthetic to be approved? Does anybody have links to New Zealand government documentation that legally defines "risks" and "benefits" within the approval process for bringing a new legal recreational synthetic drug to market? What exactly constitutes tipping the scale toward approval? There's got to be something fairly unprecedented going on in how they're saying they're going to interpret their minimax charts if they actually expect to convince investors to drop that kind of cash on a roll of what has to be suspected are weighted dice.
That said, when the drugs you're trying to replace with new legal alternatives are crack, heroin, and meth, looking to develop safer alternatives with legit research rather than just legalizing these problem drugs really is a plausible harm reduction strategy if done in earnest.
If I were a curious investor with a lot of cash to play around with, just for kicks I'd see if I could skip some of the government tests by referencing all the past research on psilocin and attempt to bring 4-AcO-DMT to the legal market on the cheap...
And as heartbreaking as animal testing is, for Carter to denounce using animal testing for development of safer recreational drugs is disingenuous, and I suspect, a publicity stunt for her cause. As Sekio points out explicitly and others have alluded to, there are far more trivial products than safer recreational drugs that animal testing is used to bring to market. She says:
it's not even going to benefit anyone, it's just for recreational use.
... which just blatantly ignores what the whole legal replacement drug enterprise in New Zealand is, at least on a public relations level, trying to accomplish. Developing these new recreational drugs theoretically will benefit all the people who don't overdose on the older illicit recreational drugs because they use a safer alternative. That basic rationale was presumably right in her face as she said that and there's just no account of it ???
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
