Oh, hey, it's the lady at the diner weeping into her hash browns. Sally Ward, pack in as much info right now, and let's spark some discussion about weed, the psychology, the botany, the chemistry, the neurology, the legality, and the methodology, i.e. do you hold it in your lungs until you choke? Why do edibles sometimes feel like you will be high

until you become dead? And are any of those tinctures at crystal shops worth it? I track down one of the

world's best researchers on this. Oh, so excited. Studied biosecology and anthropology. Got a PhD

in psychology. Went on to do a postdoc in human

behavioral pharmacology at Columbia. They're now a professor and the vice chair for research

in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. They're the director of the UCLA

Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids. I was so committed to interviewing this particular

person that I waited three years until the scheduling worked out. Every week in an Orology staff

meeting, I would ask, have we heard back? When will my dreams come true? Finally, they did.

And on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I braved campus parking and a 90-degree

February afternoon, and soon you will hear the result. And because we can't discuss the

present without a little sprinkling of the past, I also tracked down a wonderful second expert,

a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Smith College and sat in a sunny

conference room to ask about their experience both personally and academically researching the

social stigmas and attitudes about this plant and how they've changed over time in regard to

both recreational and medicinal marijuana. Now, I felt you bristle some of you. Even the word marijuana is contentious.

Marijuana is a word that has blurry origins. It may have come from a Central American indigenous

term, although it wasn't widely grown or used in that part of the world until after Spanish

colonization. Others say marijuana was coined by anti-drug propagandists who wanted to blame it as a

plague to the moral fiber of the U.S. by way of immigration from Mexico. But as it stands,

it's the most common word for the psychoactive buds of the plant, cannabis sativa. Although

cannabis is a term is edging that out. And cannabis comes from

...