Alan Gevins and his team at SAM Technology in San Francisco are nearing the end of a large study analyzing the effects of various drugs on cognitive performance. An editor at Technology Review recently visited their offices, and downed a stiff cocktail, to experience their work first-hand.

Our most popular and addictive drugs come from plant toxins; caffeine, tobacco, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, are all derived from what are supposed to be poisons. These toxins were developed by plants to ward off herbivores who would otherwise eat them. So why is it that we not only tolerate them, but have found ourselves in a position of craving them, sometimes desperately? It is a paradox at which researchers are taking a fresh look.

Jörg Rieckermann snaps on a pair of purple rubber gloves, picks up a crowbar, and levers a manhole cover out of the way. “Here’s my access to the underworld,” Rieckermann, who speaks with a faint German accent, says as he hoists up a barrel-shaped robot suspended above a stream of raw sewage.

Don’t tell anyone, but Doug Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm—in bucolic southern Indiana, no less. It’s cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo. There, carefully cultivated stalks flourish under the glare of artificial lights and the rainlike spatter of drip irrigation.