How can you define a 'drug'? Nobody really knows

By Sam Baron, Associate Professor, Philosophy of Science, Australian Catholic University

What’s a medical drug? Ask someone on the street and they’re likely to tell you it’s the kind of thing you take when you’re unwell.

This understanding is wrong, as we will see. But after a thorough investigation, my colleagues and I found no other potential definitions are any better.

Despite their centrality to medicine, we have no idea what medical drugs are. We can’t even tell the difference between drugs and food, let alone drugs and so-called “natural” alternatives.

A Goldilocks definition

In a recent…

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