This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown.

I've hosted the Cater Daily podcast for nearly 18 years, but no more.

But I wanted to leave loyal listeners with some favorite episodes that I hope ring true and relevant to our current moment.

This is one of them.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Monday, August 21st, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is access to psychedelics and the consciousness-altering impacts they can foster a straightforward matter of cognitive liberty?

Mason Marks is a senior fellow and project lead on the project on psychedelic law and regulation at the Petrie Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

We talked about the ways in which psychedelics raise questions about what cognitive liberty really looks like and how that liberty might be reflected in the law going forward.

There was a lot of discussion about psychedelics for assisting people who are having,

I'm just going to just say mental difficulties, difficulties that may or may not be

physical in nature, but to help people grapple with those things and maybe either make different

decisions about how their lives are going or to effectively process some sort of trauma

that's occurred in their lives. And we're going to talk a little bit more about where that

conversation is right now. But you advocate something that I think is fairly provocative and is worth exploring, at least in the abstract initially, just and that is cognitive liberty and that people in some ways ought to have the ability to dramatically more

easily access these kinds of chemicals for the purposes of improving their lives. Can you

sort of spell out what you're advocating and where that fits in with what we understand about our liberties.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Certainly one of the most exciting applications of psychedelic substances is their use in mental

health care where they might dramatically improve our ability to help people with certain

...