That’s certainly true, I’m just surprised that it doesn’t work the same way(either both yes, or both no) for researchers who work on other classes of drugs. Being pro-heroin, or pro-cocaine, are both political suicide; but perfectly respectable, respected, pharmaceutical chemists pump out opiate synthetics and variants like candy(at least some of them markedly more powerful than the real stuff, like Fentanyl, and others, like Oxycontin, with sufficient real world abuse that they’ve had their own moral panics. Alkaloids, similarly, are the totally licit friends of dentists and maxillofacial surgeons everywhere, despite being a veritable family-reunion of cocaine-alikes(and sometimes cocaine itself). Nicitinoids aren’t terribly lucrative as drugs, since you can just smoke; but the pesticide guys pump those out on an industrial scale.
As for mind-altering, a lot of the not-really-used-anymore-because-REASONS early-attempt antipsychotics and other hardcore Nurse Ratchett stuff is still legal, if not common because it kind of sucks, so it’s not as though chemists are consistently kept away from scary or mind altering compounds. That’s what makes it hard for me to understand.
