You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

David Nutt is a psychiatrist and as director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of

Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, he's one of the country's

leading researchers into the effects of drugs on the brain. He caused controversy

after saying horse riding is more dangerous than ecstasy and was famously sacked from his government

role as chair of the advisory council on the misuse of drugs after criticizing the government's

decision to reclassify cannabis as a more harmful Class B drug.

But he's less famous for his extensive research into how drugs work and what they do in the

brain. And it's this that he really wants science to focus on.

Without it he says we may be missing out on their potential benefits.

They could be a source of new treatments for conditions like depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

His current research, funded by the Medical Research Council, involves assessing the effects of magic mushrooms as a possible treatment for depression.

Not surprisingly, securing funding for this kind of research isn't easy.

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