It’s mid-October, and Staci Gruber is preparing to testify before Congress. It’s not the first time she’s brought her expertise before policymakers; she’s studied marijuana in brains young and old for the better part of three decades.
Besides being on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard University, Gruber is the director of Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) and the director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core at McLean Hospital outside of Boston. Her research focuses on clinical studies in marijuana users, often employing functional MRI (fMRI) technology to see exactly what parts of the brain the drug affects.
“The important part is to try to leave the emotional rhetoric aside,” she says, ahead of her testimony before lawmakers. “What matters is what the data and the science tell us.”
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And the research landscape, so far, is about as complicated as the drug itself. Some studies show that ...
