It's Monday, February 26th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Andrei. And I'm Kishar Hari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

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So marijuana is now legal in California.

And that's going to potentially change know, potentially change the landscape.

It's already, there are already dispensaries popping up all over San Francisco, where, you know, near where I live.

And it's kind of amazing to watch. All you need to do is show your ID.

And this is true in many states across the country now.

Yeah. So we're seeing a real kind of shift in the way that certain drugs are being consumed.

And yet there's still a paucity of research of how a lot of these psychoactive drugs affect the

brain and what the potential side effects are. You know, I'm not necessarily saying that

let's all be naysayers, because after all, alcohol has a lot of deleterious effects on the brain and the rest of the body,

and it's legal. And, you know, it's still the cause, it's, you know, still causes many, many

deaths every year. But at the same time, we just haven't studied psychoactive drugs. And that's

partly being because we haven't been allowed to. Yeah, I mean, most of these drugs that you're referring to are still listed as Schedule 1 by the federal government,

which makes funding for research into that causes, in fact, very complicated to obtain.

But I have been impressed that there's lots of communities out there that are doing a form of research. If you can't feel the air quotes

through your audio right now, but these are communities that are trying to study the effects

of this, at least in their limited capacity that they have. And true to the history of how

psychoactive drugs have been studied in the past, it's often been by an individual using themselves as the subject. And so I wanted to meet a sort of modern day scientific researcher who uses himself as a subject and sort of talks about it and sort of helps us understand what the effects have been of various drugs on his own body.

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