At least that’s the case when it comes to getting around dubious drug prohibition policies. Check out this WSJ article:

When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn’s construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he’d long done as a hobby: making drugs.

But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn’t go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called "legal high" business-a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as "not for human consumption."

Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine-a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin. [.  .  .]

Mr. Llewellyn is part of a wave of laboratory-adept European entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs. They pose a stiff challenge for European law-enforcement, which is struggling to keep up with all the new concoctions. Last year, 24 new "psychoactive substances" were identified in Europe, almost double the number reported in 2008,  .  .  .

Particularly interesting is Mr. Llewellyn’s “foolproof” safety testing method for new drugs:

[Mr. Llewellyn] boasts that his safety testing method is foolproof: He and several colleagues sit in a room and take a new product "almost to overdose levels" to see what happens. "We’ll all sit with a pen and a pad, some good music on, and one person who’s straight who’s watching everything," he says.