Clandestine chemists coming out of the shadows?

Via a Google News search, this interesting The New Republic piece on clandestine chemists: 

Part of the irony of current drug laws is that we only really know about the class of clandestine chemists who have been busted, and whose sentencing frees them to talk openly about their work, which is now shaping the future of psychedelics, because they got prosecuted in the first place. A whole class of geniuses and wild eccentrics remain largely unknown, their lives and work shrouded by a secrecy and surreptitiousness that, while necessary given the current status of drug laws, feels nonetheless unfair, and a little old-fashioned. The mind reels contemplating all the Pickards, Stanleys, and Alexander Shulgins (the former Dow chemist who popularized MDMA in the 1970s) lighting upon novel chemical synthetics in the underground. Such new compounds may well constitute the forefront of psychedelic medicine. Compass Pathways recently launched a Drug Discovery Center at Philadelphia’s University of Sciences, where lead researcher Jason Wallach claims to have already synthesized 100 new serotonergic compounds.

This bears watching, and it will be interesting to see if having a career in, say, psychedelic medicinal chemistry could be a reality in our futures. That would make for an unusual ACS National Meeting symposium...