Juriscription: finding the medicines missing somewhere

An Arb Research project You can't buy melatonin in the UK.[1] In the US, it's hard to avoid: it's in gas station soft drinks. You can legally get bupropion online in the UK, while in the US it's prescription only. 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 just between the US and UK.Background. A while back I noticed a bunch of "discordances" (medicines banned or unapproved in one country, but approved, even OTC, in another)Despite being broadly sceptical of the health impacts of microplastic, I found myself admiring PlasticList and noticing that one could easily do this for all medicines. Moreover, various countries have "regulatory recognition agreements", where they can reuse each other's vetting work and so 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 good 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. e.g. 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. It's on their desk and we'll see.Use cross-country data to draw attention to the arbitrariness of regulatory decisionsHelp people look where to get meds they can't get at homeIf you've just moved countries, you can also look up the equivalent of your favourite medsLimitationsWe manually inspected a big sample of the outputs of the pipeline, but there are 200,000 rows here and we're not pharmacists.The 2026