This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, May 28th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

I Alet Waldman's Mood Disorder was taking a toll, not just on her, but on her family.

So after consulting the relevant research,

she tried tiny doses of LSD.

Her book, A Really Good Day, details her experience,

and what she believes is a drug that may hold great therapeutic value.

We talked about her experience and the slowly changing policy surrounding psychedelics.

Before you wrote this book, you were a writer.

Yes.

What brought you to this subject?

Well, you know, before I was a writer, I was a lawyer.

I was a federal public defender and then I taught law first at Loyola Law School in

Los Angeles where I taught constitutional criminal procedure and criminal law and

then at UC Berkeley where I created a seminar called the

legal and social implications of the war on drugs which was basically a

semester long exploration of the ramifications of the war on drugs from when it first

began in the United States through the present day. And in the course of those efforts

I had occasion to become to become familiar with a lot of the research out there

on various different drugs. My area of interest was mostly criminal justice

reform, but I did, you know, I read a lot about lots of different drugs and I read a lot about medical research and I ended up doing some consulting work for the APHA and the AMA on different policies that had public health ramifications.

And so I was sort of in that world.

...