The Obsolescence Engine: Artificial Intelligence, the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act, and the Future of Psychoactive Substance Regulation

Artificial intelligence is rapidly eroding the practical value of structure-based drug control law. The Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986 was designed for a world in which human chemists iteratively modified known narcotics and prosecutors could still anchor enforcement around the legal fiction of "substantial similarity." That framework is increasingly mismatched to a computational environment in which generative models can explore vast regions of chemically plausible psychoactive space, optimize for functional effect, and surface compounds that may evade intuitive structural comparison altogether.

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