Hello,

Hello, Prestige Head

to your soul.

Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome back to the podcast today, Ben Fung. Ben is Honors Faculty Fellow at, is Ann Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University,

and he's also the associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy, also at ASU.

Ben, thanks again for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me back. And of course, to be clear,

we've invited Ben to talk again about his book, Quick Fixes, Drugs in America,

from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. So, Ben, last time we left off moving from psychotropics

to psychedelics. And it's interesting, the last three chapters of the book, psychedelics,

Cocaine, and Marijuana, which we'll be discussing today, are the, I would say the major drugs that Americans think of when they think of drugs. So it's a fun way

to end the book. But what do we need to know about the history of psychedelics and where psychedelics

stands in American culture today? Sure. I mean, as with many chapters, I sort of structured it dialectically, which was a nerdy

thing to do, admittedly. But I see the psychedelic development in the United States in three phases.

The first, which I think we touched upon briefly last time, was the use of psychedelics by the CIA and MK Ultra.

That was more than just a pretty wild torture experiment.

It was also really the source of LSD in America.

In one anecdote, the CIA sent an order to the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly

to produce LSD for them for their experiments and they apparently got a decimal point wrong.

And so Eli Lilly started producing tonnage quantities in their own description of LSD.

That's true.

Yeah. No, I'm asking you, is that true with a point?

...