We've written in the past about how ill-informed legislators tend to rush towards prohibiting drugs, kicking them into the schedule-one category—which legally declares those drugs to have have zero medicinal value, which makes it much more difficult for researchers to get the resources and permissions to actually study those drugs to see if they have any medicinal value.

Those decisions shouldn't be up to ill-informed legislators hoping to score votes on shoddy science and scare-politics. They should be up to scientists who at least have an inkling of what past research has shown.

And that's my talking point for posting this story in New Scientist about research into MDMA and whether it might be used as a treatment for PTSD. To be part of the study, you have to take a mystery pill—maybe MDMA, maybe something else—then sit in a noisy fMRI machine for over an hour.

That doesn't sound even remotely fun. But science has its demands! (For a first-hand account of some other psychedelic scientific research—by a guy who started out as an organic chemist and became a psychologist—see these excerpts from a talk at the Smoke Farm Symposium I posted earlier today.)