Vox writer German Lopez investigated how the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin, is currently being studied in its effectiveness to treat such issues as depression, OCD, anxiety, addiction. While He found that the studies had great success, he also found that the studies a few and far between due to the fact that psychedelics cannot be patented, which means that there’s no real incentive to research something that doesn’t make any money.
…One thing you might still be wondering is why so much of this research is so new, when we’ve known about psychedelics for thousands of years. Well since these drugs are so old, they can’t be patented, which means that pharmaceutical companies don’t really have any incentive to fund any research into them. So that really leaves it up to governments and private contributors to fund all these studies. And there actually was a lot of research done into these drugs in the 50s and 60s, but there was a big enough backlash to the abuse of psychedelics in that period, especially around events like Woodstock, that funding really dried up, and research stopped.And that’s why it’s only now that we see this research happening, with private, not government contributions.