Hello everyone. To review what we've learned thus far, we know that cannabis was used as a medicine for thousands of years, in some of the same ways, and for some of the same reasons that people use it today. Back then, there was no consistent scientific approach to establishing evidence for the effectiveness of the medicine. People made decisions about whether to use it based on what they heard from others. A far cry from our modern approach to establishing evidence therapeutic effects by using randomized controlled trials. Cannabis fell out of favor with the medical and pharmaceutical industry around the beginning of the 20th century. At the same time, it also became one of the targets as a sustained effort to control psychoactive drugs. The next module reviews the barriers to research in the United States that grew out of those efforts to control psychoactive drugs. Is worth noting that those barriers have been amazingly effective. Even today, despite all of our effort, is impossible to do research that involves cannabis purchased from a local dispensary on any university campus in the US. This is completely ridiculous. Consumers in Colorado alone purchased about one million edible units per month, about 30,000 pounds of flour per month, and more than 325,000 units of concentrate per month. Yet our university is Nobel Prize winning chemist, are now allowed to analyze those products to make sure they are safe for the public to consume, or allowed to test products to make sure that labeling is accurate. Our best neuroscientists and are now allowed to give adolescent rats, high potency concentrates or edibles to determine what if any effect those might have on the developing brain or immune system, come on. What role does that make any sense? It doesn't make sense to our university legal team or administrators, and doesn't make sense to our representatives in Congress. But nonetheless, it has proven impossible to change even years after legalization in Colorado. Nixon had no idea just how effective the Controlled Substances Act was going to be. Likewise, the drugs the Federal Workplace Act has also been incredibly effective at preventing research on university campuses. On the institutional side of the equation, the DEA and FDA have also been affected that maintaining barriers to research on the medical benefits. So what are the consequences of all these barriers and the lack of research today? How did it influence that we have today? Well, obviously one consequence is that there has not been a lot of research on the benefits of cannabis. Unrelated consequence is that the lack of research has opened the door to people making all kinds of unfounded claims about the benefits of cannabis and CBD. Not only will this module review that barrier to research and the consequences of those barriers, it will also give you some tools for evaluating evidence and claims about the potential harms and benefits of CBD and cannabis. These tools are very important in a polarized environment in which people make lots of claims some without a lot of support about the harms or benefits of cannabis products. I hope you find these tools and this module to be helpful.