Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you Michael Pollen, for being here. I speak on behalf of this entire room who seems incredibly excited at your presence. Well, it's great to be here and this beautiful, this beautiful room. Yeah. This is a wonderful place, especially for this conversation. . Yes. It's got about changing our minds.

Well it has spiritual implications. Yes, it does. Um, and I wanna come to that. Um, I was thinking with Philip's remarks that this is just. The kind of program that Scott Falk would've been deeply engaged with him. You know, he's a lawyer and he would've had lots of questions and thoughts about policy. And so I will do my best to, um, channel, honor his spirit, channel him, um, in my questions tonight.

Um, but I wanna say that I have so many questions for you because this is a remarkable book. It's just fabulous. And thank you so much for writing it and for bringing this history back to us. Um, and I wanted to start though with, not with the history that you're, um, writing about here, but something more recent.

You wrote an op-ed for the New York Times after Denver made the move to decriminalize, um, Ibin and. You know, this is a book that extols the potential of psychedelics, um, for science medicine, for our spirituality, for religion. It has the potential to treat addiction, depression, um, really gain purchase on things that really hamper our, our lives, um, that other drugs have not have not been able to do.

Um, so it's sort of in praise of psychedelics, right? But you, in your op-ed, cautioned, we should go slowly around legalizing. Yeah. Why, why are you concerned about decriminalization? Well, it was a, it was actually a tough call because, you know what, what happened in Denver was there was a, a vote in the county of Denver, and it basically, uh, instructed, it's not quite decriminalization.

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