It's way past time this was taken out of the hands of politicians and moral crusaders, and back into the hands of those qualified to carry out this research, and those qualified to diagnose illness to prescribe remedies.

It would lead the way further to reconsideration of a whole range of 'disorders', not least by removing the drug spectre from our persistent ideation of deviance and criminality.

Here in Western Australia the police commissioner has even come out arguing that race is the elephant in the room when it is not, it is illicit drugs. Even his own son is now in prison, caught running a home lab when it exploded in his face, which gives you a measure of its extent.

Only last weekend yet another house was blown up, a gaping hole through the roof and a 5 year-old boy badly burned.

For the rest of your argument to hold, Macdonald, it has to be clarified to what extent misuse of currently illicit drugs differs or will differ from any other drug or medication. One might expect that under medical supervision and restricted supply because a prescription item instead of illegal trade, misuse will dramatically diminish.

A disclaimer lest I be misquoted, I am a beer drinker and enjoy my beer. I declare no interest in drugs, illicit or otherwise, beyond years of engagement and intervention with families suffering from drug problems. Any ethnographer or sociaologist of contemporary Western society will quickly and unavoidably encounter the same thing. Better to employ us at miniscule cost to advise the situation than continue suffering the vastly expensive and ineffective regime currently in place.

That's a plug, that bit anyway.

People interested in such issues might like this article:
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic

TBH, its talk of guides etc doesn't sound like A-1 scientific methodology to me. The claim that Francis Crick used LSD to determine the double helix has been entirely discredited.

This claim is intriguing:
"The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties. Fadiman and his colleagues published these jaw-dropping results and closed shop." But I would want to see a proper citation for it.

If anything I find the idea you could only solve the double helix by dropping acid slightly demeaning and anti-human. Linus Pauling managed to come up with a slightly related and even more intricate (and completely wrong) structure for DNA stone cold sober.

Although I do find the story amusing about the Californian in the 1960's who dropped some acid and heard a mysterious voice asking why is there no picture of the whole earth. He began bombarding NASA and stray passers-by with pamphlets demanding a picture of the whole earth from space. NASA became so concerned they hired a investigator to check him out for possible subversive connections, the investigator wrote a report saying he seemed fairly harmless and then concluded "By the way, why don't we have a picture from space of the whole earth?"
A year or so later NASA coughed one up

One of the biggest problems in getting research established on promising substances is the way that you ask the question. Calling all candidates " illicit drugs" fails to discriminate the differences among the group. That is like asking if all plants should be legal. There is a huge difference between the risks of cannabis research and the risk of LSD research. Cannabis has a very long history of use in all populations, whereas these other drugs are not natural plants, but chemical compositions of unknown character. Each substance has to be judged on it's own merits. Stereotypes never accomplish understanding, but actually prevent it by ignoring the details.

Cannabis should be re-classified to allow research, as it has already been shown to be useful. Another big problem is that with a capitalist approach, only profitability is considered, not medical benefit in general. Cannabis can be grown by individuals with little expense, but extracts of it will be sold at the highest price possible, leaving many patients unable to get medicine. Also a natural plant substance does not contain extracts, it contains combinations of active ingredients, some of which balance beneficial against harmful attributes. When only one chemical is removed from the plant, the effect is changed. The pharmaceutical companies want drugs to sell, and prefer exclusive supplies, but patients need effective, safe, and low cost medicine. This is why frivolous drugs like Rogain are developed, but many needed drugs are not, because it is all about making the maximum profit, not about helping patients.

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101?currentPage=all

"An estimated 770,000 people are injured or die each year in hospitals from adverse drug events (ADEs) defined as an injury resulting from medical intervention related to a drug. Not all, but many, IF NOT MOST, of these adverse drug events are preventable."

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/Patient_Safety_and_Medication_Errors.asp

* The number of deaths from drug poisonings in the U.S. has increased sixfold since 1980.

* In 2008, more than 41,000 people in the U.S. died from intentional and accidental poisonings - Nine out of 10 were due to drugs. These deaths exceeded the number of deaths from automobile accidents making poisoning the leading cause of injury death. (CDC National Center for Health Statistics 1980 to 2008)

Fully 40% of these deaths in 2008 involved the use of prescription opioid pain relievers such as codeine, fentanyl, hydrocodone, morphine, and oxycodone, (was 25% in 1999) - In 2008, Cocaine was involved in about 5,100 deaths and heroin was involved in about 3,000 deaths.

http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20111220/deaths-drug-poisoning-in-us-jump-sixfold

* PRESCRIPTION PAINKILLERS: drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone, the main ingredients in Oxycontin and Vicodin, landed 305,885 Americans in emergency rooms in 2008 -- more than double the 144,644 visits in 2004, (2010 study by Samsha and the CDC)

Overdose deaths involving these opioid pain relievers (oxycodone and hydrocodone; and synthetic narcotics such as fentanyl and propoxyphene) now exceed deaths from heroin and cocaine combined (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Prescription drug overdoses have been increasing in the United States over the last decade, and by 2008 had reached 36,450 deaths - almost as many as from motor vehicle crashes (39,973).

http://www.acep.org/MobileArticle.aspx?id=82888&coll_id=720&parentid=740

* VIOXX: On January 24, 2005, the medical journal The Lancet published on its website a report on Vioxx risks that was previously blocked by the FDA. The study found that Vioxx may have caused as many as 140,000 cases of heart disease in the United States and as many as 56,000 deaths during the five years that it was on the market. The newly published study of 1.4 million patients shows that that low doses of Vioxx increased the risk of heart disease by about 50%, and higher doses increased it by 358%.

http://www.vioxxnews.com/

* ACETAMINOPHEN: ( found in more than 300 products with sales in the billions of dollars annually) Acetaminophen overdoses are the leading cause of acute liver failure (ALF) in the United States, Great Britain and most of Europe. Acetaminophen toxicity accounts for approximately 50% of all cases of ALF in the United States and carries a 30% mortality. -More than 100,000 calls to Poison Control Centers, 56,000 emergency room visits, 2,600 hospitalizations and nearly 500 deaths are attributed to acetaminophen in the United States annually.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hep.21926/pdf

* ANTIDEPRESSANTS: The respected journal, PLoS ONE, published a study in June 2010, showing that men who are depressed and take trycyclic, SSRI, or any other antidepressants die at a significantly greater rate than those who don't. - Performed in Australia, the study followed 5,276 men aged 68-88.

"The results of this study indicate that the 6-year adjusted mortality hazard is twice as high for men with depression compared with non-depressed men and that the use of antidepressants is associated with an independent rise in mortality of 30%. .. We found that antidepressant treatment increases the mortality hazard of men by 30%, and this association is independent of the presence of clinically significant depression. .. It is also important to consider that the use of antidepressants has been associated with numerous potentially harmful effects, some of which may increase morbidity and mortality. For example, antidepressant treatment has been linked to increased risk of injurious and non-injurious falls in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, and there is some evidence that the use of common antidepressants increases the risk bleeding in various body systems, including the central nervous system, as well as the risk of incident diabetes. In addition, recently published findings from the Nurses' Health Study showed an increase in the number of sudden cardiac deaths associated with the use of antidepressants, a result that is consistent with our observation of an excess of cardiovascular deaths amongst men using antidepressants."

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011266

Postmenopausal Women on antidepressants are 45% more likely than those not on such medication to have a stroke, and 32% more likely to die of any cause. - There is an increased likelihood of Hemorrhagic strokes (bleeding in the brain) which is possibly the result of the anti-clotting effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) which are most frequently prescribed for depression. The authors of the study noted that since post-menopausal women make up the largest segment of patients in the United States on antidepressants, the resulting increases in strokes and deaths across the country could be significant.

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/169/22/2128?home

A study published in 2009 found that SSRIs interfered with the breast cancer medication tamoxifen, with tumors more than twice as likely to return after two years in women taking antidepressants compared with those taking tamoxifen alone.

Children whose mothers take Zoloft, Prozac, or similar antidepressants during pregnancy are twice as likely as other children to have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/07/04/antidepressant.pregnancy.autism.risk/index.html

"Should governments make it easier to perform human research to discover medical uses of illicit drugs such as cannabis..."

According to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 [http://www.incb.org/pdf/e/conv/convention_1961_en.pdf]:
"The Parties, Concerned with the health and welfare of mankind, Recognizing that the medical use of narcotic drugs continues to be indispensable for the relief of pain and suffering and that adequate provision must be made to ensure the availability of narcotic drugs
for such purposes, ... "

Cannabis does provide relief for pain:
- http://americannewsreport.com/researcher-says-marijuana-is-safer-alternative-to-painkillers-8815280.html
- http://norml.org/library/item/chronic-pain
... many, many more studies available via your favourite search engine

So according to the act, the government must provide access.