Why a compound being unapproved is not the same as being illegal to possess I have a specific reason for asking rather than idle curiosity, and the context is below.
Collecting what is known about compound being unapproved in one place, because it is currently spread across a category, two tag pages and a thread that is hard to find.
This is a summary rather than new work, and I have attributed each part to where I found it.
Adding the measurement that the opening post says would settle it.
Regulatory positions change: a compound's status today might differ from its status a year from now. Citing a regulatory position is worth doing only with a date attached.
The general case is well covered; this is the awkward specific one.
Agreed, and I will stop repeating the version of this I had been repeating.
Two things can be true about compound being unapproved at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.
Where a claim about legality is made here, the useful follow-up is which instrument it rests on. Most such claims turn out to rest on a forum post.
Not a conclusion. A place to stand while looking for one.
Post #5 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.
Research-use-only status is a legal classification, not a safety classification. It means the compound is sold for laboratory use and not for human consumption. The label does not establish whether the molecule is safe, efficacious, or toxic.
That is the shape of it. The detail is where I would expect to be corrected.
Compounding and pharmacy rules: some jurisdictions allow a pharmacy to compound a drug that is not on the market under specific conditions. The conditions are strict and vary by jurisdiction. Generalising from one country's rules to another's is unreliable.
What would change my mind on compound being unapproved is a second dataset collected by someone with no stake in the first. Until then I hold it loosely and I would rather say so than pretend to more.
Post #10 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Import restrictions vary by compound and by jurisdiction: what is a controlled substance in one place is legal to purchase in another. What you can import for personal use depends on your country's rules, not on where it is sold.
Anyone with a larger sample, please post it.
A regulator's public assessment report is usually the single best free source on a compound's evidence base, and it is almost never cited here.
Understood, and I withdraw the assumption I opened with.
Post #12 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.
Labelling and intended use: a compound sold as "research-use-only" does not change its pharmacology if ingested. It changes the legal status of the sale. The labelling tells you the intended use, not the actual use people make of it.
I have seen it go both ways, which is why I hedge.
Nobody has said the unglamorous part of compound being unapproved yet, so: most of the variation is explained by things that are boring to write about and easy to check.
Picking up post #18: that is the part I would want checked first.
Preclinical versus clinical: compounds with strong preclinical data can fail in clinical trials. Compounds with no human data are being used on theoretical grounds. The regulatory position reflects this asymmetry.
Second-hand, so weight it accordingly.
On post #16 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Compound being unapproved is one of those subjects where the general answer and the answer for a specific case diverge, and the thread will go in circles until someone says which one is being asked for.
Adding what did not work for me on compound being unapproved, since the failures never get written up and they are half the useful information.
Worth separating two things that post #21 runs together.
Generic or biosimilar entry depends on patent and exclusivity positions that are jurisdiction-specific and are frequently misreported.
Marking that as an opinion rather than a finding.
On post #25 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Two sentences on compound being unapproved and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.
What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.
Picking up post #25: that is the part I would want checked first.
A compound in a compounding pathway in one country and unavailable in another is a common situation and produces most of the confusion here.
Worth reading the earlier posts in this thread before acting on mine.
Answering the question post #25 raises rather than the one it answers.
I would be cautious about generalising from the compound being unapproved example above. It is a good example. It is one example.
Where a claim about legality is made here, the useful follow-up is which instrument it rests on. Most such claims turn out to rest on a forum post.