New Zealand's olive branch to RC manufacturers is one of the more interesting things in this regard (if you haven't heard, there's a proposal to legalize/regulate certain psychoactive drugs if they can prove that it has a "low risk of harm.")
I've always wondered what would happen if recreational drug compounds underwent a similar screening process that standard pharmaceuticals do today. The reason most RCs tend to suck is because the compounds are raided from research papers that care little but exploring how molecules react in the brain. There are very few rationally designed recreational RCs out there, certainly none that goes through trials. It is noteworthy that one that *was* rationally designed (MXE) ended up being one of the more popular ones. Also, poor quality control (including poor synthesis and cut product) probably contributes to the poor reputation of many RCs, a legal market would clean up that act.
This is one of the "wild cards" of the future because it all depends on exactly what New Zealand means in their experiment. One problem is that the most popular RCs tend to be stimulants, and probably most of them are too questionable to pass the "low risk of harm" threshold (depends on how low the bar is, people don't die on monoamine releasers but some mess themselves up). I think a fair bit of RC tryptamines *do* carry a low risk of harm but they are not as popular. MXE and others in their class are kind of "in between" risk wise.
It's a wild card, though. I think the only certainly is the growing acceptance of cannabis. There will come a time when history will look about as darkly on cannabis prohibition as alcohol prohibition.
