You can say the exact same thing for Zoloft. If you took a single 100mg dose you will notice the effects. But the line that crosses therapeutic to recreational (yes SSRIs are abused recreationally but are very short lived) is somewhere between 0 and 100mg and differs based on your biological makeup. Clinical trials and reports from prescribing psychiatrists helps find that hard distinction..
They can track and establish the base rate of such effects conditioned on a random population to blur the role of one's "biological makeup", and then apply value judgements as to what doses are useful for their purposes, yes.
In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? Could bad trips not also occur at lower doses considered sub-recreational if a person is particularly sensitive? Likewise what happens if the drug only ends up benefiting a person past the point where they also have hallucinations as a "knock-on"?
>In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose?
that is literally the point of a psychiatrist. there is only the law preventing psychiatrists from administering psychedelics like LSD in the same fashion. there are natural practitioners who do this for e.g. marijuana today.
if someone has an adverse reaction (bad trip) then the doctor usually alters the administration of the medicine in some manner (Lower dosage, increase dosage, change medication all together etc). but to say that there are only recreational doses for illicit drugs and there is no method to validate potency in human consumption is disingenuous.
a drug is a chemical. our body is nothing but a chain of chemical reactions. modern medicine and science has come up with a pretty good method of determining dosage
