Hey, everyone, it is Dylan.

So, as you are probably aware, it is election week.

There's a lot going on.

We may all be slightly tense in our own ways.

So this week on the show, we're going to try and chill.

This week is themed weed week.

And I mean the kind of weed you're thinking of. We are talking about cannabis, the science of cannabis, the places around cannabis, how your experience of cannabis might change depending on where you are.

We're going to bring you stories about a group of climbers in Yosemite who discovered

thousands of pounds of pot unexpectedly. We'll visit the first known place on earth where people

smoked weed in order to get stoned. And we're going to talk to

someone who is at the forefront of the underground medical marijuana scene in San Francisco in the

1980s. But today we are going to begin weed week with a science story. A recent study reported

that more people are consuming marijuana each day than there

are people drinking alcohol. Yet we don't actually know that much about what that means

scientifically. Cannabis is now legal in some form or another in over half of U.S. states,

but since it is still federally illegal, it makes it incredibly, incredibly

hard to study it.

So if you are a researcher trying to understand what this means for people and the country,

how do you go about it?

Today, we are going to Colorado to talk to some scientists who got very creative about how they would start to answer some of these questions, and they made their very own place, their very own system to study weed.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world strange, incredible,

and its dankest places.

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