Can Marijuana's Active Ingredient Prevent or Reverse Alzheimer's Disease?

[Alfi]

Are new drugs tested for Psychological effects as well as Physiological effects?

 

[Pythagorean]

Yes, and I believe that this is being done, as you mentioned.

It's the people smoking it for pleasure and saying recreational use of it should be legal because it could have benefits if the active ingredients could be made into a medcine that I find blowing smoke, so to speak.

I know alcoholics who rationalize the same way. However, they're legally justified to drink and probably only because they're more violent protesters (for instance, Prohibition was a mess. Do not take the bottle away from Joe the Plumber.)

I agree with most libertarians on this issue. If alcohol is legal, than there's no reason why any other mind altering substances shouldn't be legal simply for their recreational use (as long as they're relatively safe, which marijuana is often considered by society; it's often considered safer than alcohol). If it's legal, then at least it is controlled. This way it can also be separated from organized crime where more dangerous drugs are.

In addition, legalization would result in much less harassment of medical marijuana patients. They'd also be able to find it or grow it themselves. That's not the main argument, but it's a supporting argument for legalization.

 

[Cincinnatus]

Are new drugs tested for Psychological effects as well as Physiological effects?

If the drug is meant to be a psychopharmaceutical or if it has a strong binding affinity for brain receptors and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier then yes of course this is done.

If there is no a priori reason to think that a drug is psychoactive then testing is almost certainly more haphazard. I've heard (possibly apocryphal) stories about a certain drug with hallucinogenic properties (supposedly stronger than LSD) making it to stage 3 clinical trials and being described as causing a "behavioral syndrome" without further explanation. This drug was never approved.

The fact is, we know very little about how psychoactive substances produce their effects. This goes for everything from Prozac to LSD. We've made a lot of progress- especially with cocaine (and the DA system in general) but there's a long way to go. The starting place for the field is usually:

"we know this or that drug produces this or that effect and we know that it targets this receptor which is located on these neurons" What we are missing is what happens in between...