Plants of the Gods: S4E10. Cannabis: Seeing Through the Smoke

Well, this is what I like so much about your book.

You have a chapter on these key themes, cannabis and addiction, cannabis and driving, cannabis and pregnancy.

And that's why I thought it's such a special piece of work because it's sort of an autobiography and it's sort of a clinical study and it's sort of a philosophical rumination.

And I can't think of many books that fit that genre.

You may own that yourself.

Well, I had good role models growing up.

I mean, my dad's two best friends were John Mack, the psychiatrist who won a Pulitzer Prize for writing a psychoanalytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia.

And his other best friend was Carl Sagan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for writing Dragons of Eden.

And The thing about my dad is that he was a great writer.

Everybody knows him for his sort of fearless positions and like articulate advocacy.

But he was actually a very masterful writer as well.

So like writing was always...

And then my brother David, who I love and admire, is a great writer.

So writing was always like, to me, like the highest art form.

And I had always just been like... very, very eager to work on my writing.

And I just, to me, admire writers more than anybody.

So I put a lot of effort into it.

Thank you for saying that.

But I really, it's really important to me, my writing.

Well, another important scientific writer is Andrew Weil, also another graduate of Harvard Medical School, also a former student of Richard Schultes.

And Andrew Weil tells a story in the foreword to Seeing Through the Smoke of your father setting out to do a study or write a paper showing why marijuana was so addictive and dangerous and coming to the opposite conclusion.

Right, well, his original article was in Scientific American in 1969.

There's actually a cool picture of Jerry Garcia holding that episode or that issue.

But he started out with the whole cannabis stuff.

He was ensconced in the Harvard psychiatric community.