Mowgli Holmes, the chief scientific officer of Phylos Bioscience, a start-up that’s studying the cannabis genome, thinks growers will use high-tech breeding to produce less-potent pot—cutting the THC content from 30 percent to something more like 4 percent. “Breeding has been inward-looking, making products for stoners,” he says, comparing currently available varieties to moonshine. “Normal people want to try it but can’t, because they get too high. Legalization should lead to options more like wine and beer.”

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But high-tech breeding could also produce a more far-out high. In the science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick wrote about the mood organ, a device that allows people to choose how they want to feel. The pot of the future could work similarly, Holmes says. Already, many sellers market their product by the mood it’s said to produce. In analyzing the cannabis genome, Holmes hopes to find markers in certain strains of weed that make people feel calm, or creative, or even hungry.

2. Sobriety May Come in a Pill

Scientists have been searching for a very long time for compounds that can reduce or reverse the effects of alcohol, says Aaron White, the senior scientific adviser at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In the 1990s, when he was in graduate school, everyone seemed to think Ro15-4513 might be that drug. Images circulated, he says, of a drunk rat lying on its back with its feet in the air next to a healthy-looking rat that had taken Ro15-4513. Unfortunately, it turned out that the drug also caused seizures.

Today, one promising candidate is dihydromyricetin, or DHM, a compound that can be derived from the extract of a raisin tree native to Asia. The Chinese have used the extract to treat hangovers for hundreds of years, and research on rats suggests that it can mitigate some of alcohol’s effects on behavior and may even help protect a fetus from exposure to alcohol. But we have to be careful, White says. DHM appears to block the effects of alcohol on one type of receptor in the brain. That receptor, gaba A , happens to be associated with some of the really obvious signs of alcohol consumption—sleepiness, loss of balance, memory impairment, and blackouts. But it’s not the only receptor involved in the neuropharmacology of drunkenness. There’s a risk, White says, that DHM could make people feel less drunk without actually making them sober, with potentially disastrous results if they were to get behind the wheel or otherwise misjudge their impairment.

3. Skirting the Law Will Be Easier

The Web has been intertwined with drug use since its beginning, says Mike Power, the author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High. In fact, the first thing ever sold online, in 1972, was a bag of weed. Today, the Dark Web—the shadowy part of the Internet that doesn’t show up in search engines and is known for hosting criminal activity—provides a secret marketplace for drugs. The Internet also enables people to design, produce, and distribute analogs—legal drugs whose chemistry differs only slightly from that of their illegal cousins. As part of his reporting, Power used the Internet to order a legal, bespoke stimulant from a Chinese laboratory, based on the chemistry of a drug called phenmetrazine, which was reportedly beloved by the Beatles.