@lastever I'm not sure I have the expertise to properly and fully answer your question, but there are a few relevant dimensions.

It is absolutely part of pharmaceutical research that once a pharmco-chemical pathway is found that has a proven, positive therapeutic effect, huge efforts are applied at finding other molecules that achieve the same or related therapeutic benefits, with greater efficiacy, specificity and safety (fewer side effects). This is a big part of what drives the industry R&D efforts.

I do not have a good understanding of products derived from cannabinoids, but there are many products and research programs seeking to isolate, discover and apply this class of compounds to a range of conditions.

The reason why your idea of taking something 20% less effective and selling it as a cheap alternative is not a focus of the R&D-driven pharmaceutical industry, is that the high value that repays the R&D investment comes from maximising specificity, efficacy and safety.

A generic, cheap product needs a market of millions or tens of millions of customers paying $100 per year to create the $0.1sbn-$10sbn revenue products needed to sustain the industry.

A more specific, and effective product can achieve revenues of $10,000s - $100,000s per patient per year, and therefore only require 1,000 - 100,000 patients to achieve $0.1-$10s bn revenues.

Finally, all drug companies are "concerned" about competitors coming up with something that is as effective, safer and cheaper. They just can't do anything about it beyond patenting what they have, which protects them for a period of time to recoup their investments.

Again - not a complete or entirely accurate answer. But that's what I came up with given a few moments' thought.

Appreciate the quick response@mikebrisy. I’m possibly jumping at shadows here.

To clarify, what I’m thinking of is customers themselves looking for cheaper alternatives who may be willing to experiment with products that have no RnD costs at all because they are not marketed as pharmaceuticals. They may be marketed as moisturisers, or undifferentiated CBD. Or a particular generic CBD isolate. And I meant to say 20% as effective, so perhaps most relevant to those patients who have less severe symptoms. But this is the largest population I’d imagine.

To attempt to answer my own question, maybe this happens at the margins and takes 10 years to become widely known about if it happens to work, which like many ‘folk remedies’ it may not for many people. Most people will take the pharma product which is 5x as effective because it is an isolate, and clean and easy to apply.

@lastever well, the world of "alternative medicine" is something I definitely don't understand, and I am sure there are people who will try all kinds of things. I can't spend much time thinking about that. And I certainly don't worry about it.