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You can't buy melatonin in the UK. In the US, it's hard to avoid: it's in gas station soft drinks. How general is this kind of thing? Our new beige site looks at every case where medical regulators disagree about whether to approve a medicine. We found 101 instances www.juriscription.info/results

A while back I noticed a bunch of "discordances" (medicines banned or unapproved in one country, but approved, even OTC, in another)

And, (despite being broadly sceptical of the health impacts of microplastic) I found myself admiring plasticlist.org and noticing that one could easily do this for all medicines.

Various countries have "regulatory recognition agreements", where they can reuse each other's work and get things approved quickly if it's already approved in a sensible jurisdiction. So THEN (one thought) one could use these agreements to get hundreds of meds approved elsewhere

Surely (one thought), AI is good enough now to make this a weekend job. Unfortunately not. It's nearly unbelievable how messy and ambiguous pharma data is. One pharma company, Novartis (75000 employees), needs around 3000 analysts, statisticians, data guys to function.

Still, over a full damn year we had a go with huge amounts of manual work on top of Claude's virtual work. We only got around to doing US, UK, and EU. Caveat aegrotus

What's the point?: * I was looking to get ambroxol and melatonin approved in the UK, and dreamt that there would be many others. We'll see. * Use cross-country data to draw attention to the arbitrariness of decisions * Help people look up where to get meds they can't get at home

* If you like data gore, this is the worst data I've seen in a long career, and lives are at stake here * If you've just moved countries, you can also look up the equivalent of your favs

Most of the 101 are nbd, but some aren't

Serious caveats: We manually inspected the outputs of the pipeline, but there are 200,000 rows here and we're not pharmacists. The 2026 models would do a lot better but we're out of patience. It's not obvious what fraction of discordances *should* resolve to universal approval

We did all the data work before Claude Code existed; I hope to trick one of you into doing better than us. Should take a weekend (: