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YouTube “You’re not a medical user if you care about taste”

Yeah, plus:

- Taste is dictated to a large extent by terpenes, and terpenes are probably therapeutic, users get used to the terpenes that work for them and create a positive association with that taste, so it could be reverse causation where the therapeutic match is the reason for the resultant enjoyment of the taste rather than enjoyment in taste leading you to the drug in the first place.

- It's a general principle of pharmacology that the more palatable a drug is, the easier it's going to be to get a patient to take it as regularly as they need to, and that can influence all sorts of aspects of drug production like how easy it is to swallow if it's a pill, or how it tastes if it's a children's calpol, what sort of scent it has if it's a topical cream, etc.

Although to play devil's advocate, I can see that argument that if we make drugs too palatable then that can be a problem, and there are indeed some medicines that have an artificial "medicalised" taste/scent added to it to prevent abuse or to prevent children take an interest in it inadvertently, etc.

But what worries me is that the argument heavily mimics the argument recently used to ban flavoured nicotine vapes etc other than tobacco flavour. Absolutely ridiculous notions that 1) children are especially drawn to fruit-flavoured vape products, etc. No, I'm pretty sure the enjoyment of fruit flavours is universal across all apes of all ages on all continents. 2) children will give up vaping if it tastes like tobacco... eh, no, dexter, all you're doing now is softening them and introducing them to the taste of tobacco making it MORE likely they'll switch to cigarettes again not less and 3) that vaping is somehow a huge problem in the first place - in comparison to what it replaced in just 10 short years - actual cigarettes. No, the fact you've switched teenagers from cigarettes to vapes is a huge PLUS for public health and the pleasantness of public spaces. Why mess with that?

Politicians jump at issues too quickly with too few facts and end up totally screwing things.
 
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