Pushkin.

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, The Big Short, Moneyball, and Liars Poker.

On the latest season of my podcast, Against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America, and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states, and ourselves.

I'm heading to Las Vegas and New Jersey and beyond

to understand America's newest form of legalized gambling.

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From Pushkin Industries, this is deep background, the show where we explore the stories behind the

stories in the news. The world is full of books proposing counterintuitive claims about the way things are.

You could even say books like that are a dime a dozen.

But Dr. Carl Hart's book, Drug Use for grownups, is exceptional, and I might even call it unique.

You may have heard about it in the press recently.

Dr. Hart provocatively argues that drugs, including drugs like heroin, are much safer

physiologically than we ordinarily think.

And that the major dangers, including the dangers of addiction, come from comorbidities,

risks that people have associated with mental illness and poverty,

and not from the physiological substrate of these drugs themselves.

He goes further than that, suggesting that we need a radical reform in light of a new understanding of drugs as having far fewer negative effects than we believe, and far more positive effects associated with the altering of consciousness than we usually consider.

Dr. Hart is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Columbia

University, where he's been chair of his department, and his research focuses on the physiological

and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs. The book is heavily, deeply footnoted, as I learned

by reading it closely and going into the footnotes.

...