Idea Absence About New Substances Delays Drug Development
Prejudice is an opinion formulated without due reflection, without logic or critical foundation, which is expressed through discriminatory attitudes towards other people, towards behavioral tendencies, beliefs and feelings. This definition of prejudice, found in dictionaries, is used by Professor Julieta Mieko Ueta from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Ribeirão Preto (FCFRP) at USP to explain how prejudice directed towards the production and research of new drugs, based on substances used as recreational drugs, can lead to a delay in science and in the well-being of society.
Research, production and even the use of drugs formulated from psychedelic substances still suffer from the prejudice of part of the population due to lack of knowledge about that substance, often seen only as illicit drugs. Studies with these substances began in the 1920s and almost ceased in the 1970s and 1980s, due to government determinations around the world during the hippie movement, returning to the fore in the 1990s, with more than 700 scientific publications, according to data from the Web of Science .
During the process of developing new drugs, there are several substances that are subject to prejudice, such as, for example, LSD, a hallucinogenic drug derived from a fungus, psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from a mushroom, cannabidiol, extracted from marijuana, and mescaline, hallucinogen extracted from a cactus fruit, which has shown pharmacological activity in scientific research. “It is important to understand that a drug is a chemical substance of plant, animal or synthetic origin that may eventually have a pharmacological, pharmacotherapeutic effect that is useful for society”, explains Julieta.
Quality and benefits
The origin of substances for research, aiming at the use of the population for pharmacotherapeutic purposes, according to Julieta, must comply with the precepts and quality assurance that allow the product to be used by a population to be safe. The teacher argues that, when there is this prejudice on the part of the population, it is the responsibility of the authorities to ensure that there is quality.
The beginning of research with psychedelic drugs has shown the importance of these substances in the treatment of people with neurological and psychiatric clinical conditions. According to Julieta, these products can help people who live with these disorders. “Currently, we know that post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, in addition to epilepsy and other clinical conditions, can be controlled with the use of psychedelic substances. This means that the impact of the stoppage of research and the prejudice against substances was tremendous”, says Julieta.
The prejudice expressed by a society against a certain situation can be really strong, but that doesn’t mean that regulatory bodies like the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) should take this prejudice into account, but, according to the professor, consider that it doesn’t interfere is an illusion, as in the case of cannabidiol, which had studies with epilepsy started in Brazil in the 1970s and was only included in the list of substances for controlled use by Anvisa in 2015. “The legalization of cannabidiol for refractory childhood epilepsy, by example, it was a very big battle for people who needed to take care of their children”, says Julieta.
Access to medicines
The professor says that only those who have financial conditions can access the drug due to the high cost. However, she recalls that Brazil is a model in offering innovative medicines free of charge through the Unified Health System (SUS), citing the case of HIV. “Offering medication to people who at the time already had AIDS and who today are people who are HIV positive was an evolution that suffered from prejudice, but, with the SUS offering medications that people need, I believe that we have become a model that has been going on for a while”, says Julieta.
Being a country that promoted the issue of offering high-cost drugs to the population to treat diseases considered terrible, according to Julieta, it seemed, at the time, inconceivable for a government policy to be responsible for this. “The whole process suffered and suffers from prejudice, however, today access is free, but it could not be.”