This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 18th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Psychiatrists have long believed that MDMA, known as Ecstasy, was useful in therapy,

that the DEA banned the drug anyway, effectively

shutting down research in the 1980s.

Researchers decided that FDA approval was the next best plan, and decades later, the drug will now enter phase three trials.

Mike Riggs of Reason is author of a new piece on psychedelics and federal approval.

We spoke yesterday.

Timothy Leary was known to be an exponent of psychedelics.

From your personal view, was his influence in the culture and specifically around the culture of

psychedelics was that on balance positive or negative? I think some

psychedelic enthusiasts are not going to like me saying this but on balance I think it was

negative he there was a lot of things that he encouraged that I that I think

on balance in and of themselves are good he He was a peace activist. He was a fan of self

self-exploration. He was a fan of sort of thinking differently about

cultural norms and that kind of thing.

But he also was a sort of hippie separatist, if that makes sense.

He saw no merit or point in trying to reform existing systems,

government, higher education, religious institutions. He saw no point in trying to adapt those systems to new ways of thinking.

And so he kind of just fed into the fears of the time about about psychedelic drugs and about hippies as sort of wanting to both tear those systems down and abandon them completely.

The quote that you have in your piece here is,

drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school.

...