Comment by whakim

> The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped.

This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging.

> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards

The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.