Experts in the News

A modest change in Texas’ medical marijuana law, effective Sept. 1, expands access to the plant to people with cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. The bill caps the amount of THC -- the psychoactive ingredient that can address chronic pain -- at 1%, falling short of what many advocates had hoped for. Drug policy scholar Viridiana Edwards talked about the issue.

Middle East fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar was interviewed for a New York Times explainer on the longevity of Iran's hard-line governments — against isolation abroad, internal turmoil veering on civil war and devastating wars. “It’s not despite these crises but actually precisely because of them that the regime survives,” with each episode ending with the country’s most powerful leaders and institutions rallying behind the status quo order, and with challengers sidelined, Tabaar said.

Tech experts worry about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize profits and social control, according to a recent survey. “Without a doubt, AI will do great things for us ... But AI will also be used in horribly dystopian situations,” said Dan Wallach, a Baker Institute Rice Faculty Scholar who participated in the survey.

“If ERCOT is struggling to keep the lights on this week, that doesn’t bode well for summer,” Baker institute faculty scholar Daniel Cohan said. And despite state lawmakers’ recent legislation to address February’s outages, Cohan said there's little it can do now to better prepare the state’s energy infrastructure for the sweltering heat to come. “It’s too late to do a whole lot for this summer,” he said. Still, energy fellow Michelle Michot Foss said Texas’ grid is better prepared for summer heat than extreme cold. “We deal with [heat] more often,” she said.

Gov. Greg Abbott vowed last week to build a border wall, a move critics call absurd and political science fellow Mark Jones called “political theater.” "In theory if Gov. Abbott wants to build a big wall somewhere near the U.S.-Mexico border, he can do so. But there will be issues of eminent domain and taking land, funding that wall and then actually constructing it. If it’s not part of a broader immigration system that’s coordinated with the federal government, it’s likely to not be very effective. Can you imagine if you put a big 20 mile wall in one place, there's holes around it, so people just go around it. I think really this is much more political theater than anything else."