The process that the FDA uses to evaluate drugs works well for products with a single active ingredient. Because botanical drugs have many potential active ingredients, the current process becomes complex, lengthy, and costly to evaluate botanicals with multiple ingredients. The FDA needs to come up with a process for botanicals that allow for variability and multiple active ingredients. This process would work well if surrogate chemical markers representing multiple ingredients would be used to evaluate the whole plant.Cannabis would benefit from such a process.
