In this episode, Joe interviews Keeper Trout: archivist, author, photographer, co-founder of the Cactus Conservation Institute, and creator of Trout’s Notes, a website compiling personal research and collected data to help ethnobotanical researchers.

From an interest in cactus taxonomy, Sasha Shulgin urged Trout to go through his files, resulting in a friendship, and eventually, an 8-year project of digitizing all of these files into the ever-evolving Shulgin Archive.

Trout discusses:

• His relationship with Sasha and The Shulgin Farm project, which aims to make the farm a community resource for therapy, research, events, and more
• The messiness of cactus taxonomy, and how he believes we’re nearing the end of being able to properly identify cacti
• The perception of LSD as unnatural and why the natural vs. synthetic argument is largely political
• Why repealing the Controlled Substances Act is the path we should take over decriminalization or legalization

and more!

For links and more, head to the show notes page.