David Leonhardt (2:30)

Yeah, I walk a lot in both Washington, D.C. and New York, and the smell is everywhere. I mean, if you go for a long walk at this point, you should assume you're going to smell marijuana at some point in a way that you don't actually smell tobacco anymore quite so regularly. The place that I first noticed it was Colorado, where I happen to have a whole bunch of family members live. So I go to Colorado every year, and I have been for a long time. And I remember years ago, it just started to become common to see marijuana shops pretty much everywhere. It has just become a normal part of the commercial landscape in Colorado and in some other parts of the country as well.

Emily Bazelon (3:07)

Also, the strains of weed have become so much stronger. Like, as someone who rarely actually uses it or smokes it, I feel like with edibles, I have to be really careful and start with, like, a really small amount. Just assume that it's going to be way too strong, or else I'll wake up in the morning and still. Still some kind of fog. I won't ask either of you to divulge your personal pat use unless you feel like chiming in.

Herman Lopez (3:34)

I was gonna mock myself. I remember making fun of Maureen Dowd's experience with an edible and then going to Colorado and having basically the exact same experience where I was, like, sitting in a bed just in a state of panic, just completely shocked that this was so much stronger than anything I had been used to, because I used when I was a teenager more often, and I just was not expecting it at all.

David Leonhardt (3:55)

It's a good reminder that Maureen Dowd is always right.

Herman Lopez (3:58)

That's true.

Emily Bazelon (4:00)

Okay, let's turn to our editorial and the ways in which the country has changed. That kind of set up this stance that we decided to take. So 13 years ago, there was no state that allowed recreational use of marijuana. And back in 2014, the editorial board published a whole series about legalization. David, what did the issue look like? Them.

David Leonhardt (4:26)

So the editorial board published this series in 2014, as you said, when none of us was part of the editorial board. And this was pretty early in the big legalization push. The headline on the main one was Repeal Prohibition Again. And it was a set of editorials that got a lot of attention. And as that headline suggested, the core of the argument was that the prohibition of marijuana was as wrong as the temporary prohibition of alcohol had been in the 20th century, and that Americans, at least adults, should have the freedom to smoke and use marijuana as they have the freedom to drink alcohol and Smoke tobacco.

Emily Bazelon (5:09)

Herman, you have been writing about drugs and drug policy for more than a decade. How has your thinking about marijuana shifted in that time?

Herman Lopez (5:19)

Yeah, so, I mean, when I started writing about this topic, the younger, more naive me, I really did buy into a lot of the legalization arguments. I thought marijuana was already pretty accessible. It's not like it was particularly difficult to get before. So how much can legalization possibly increase use? I thought that the country would regulate it in a much more serious way than it has. I mean, I just had a hard time believing that the country would move from criminal prohibition to just very hands off commercialization that easily. I would say that I started having my doubts fairly early because I was also covering the opioid crisis, and that is an actual example of a legal drug being marketed irresponsibly and the government really underreacting to it. So that was a first hint that, look, maybe this legalization regulation thing doesn't work exactly as it's sold. But then over time, we just saw more and more problems pop up with marijuana legalization. I mean, we've seen sharp increase in daily users. More people now use pot daily in the US Than use alcohol daily. And that is a dramatic sh. And we've seen increases in addiction. We've seen increases in people going to ers and reporting what's called cannabinoid hyperemis syndrome, which we'll just say chs, but it's like really violent nausea. Like it's not at all pleasant. And I think from a basic standpoint, you know, if you think about a functioning society, I don't have problems with somebody smoking a joint every weekend or whatever it might be, but somebody who's spending every single day stoned is just gonna be a less productive member of society. And that I think it's something that we should worry about when we see those daily increase numbers.

Emily Bazelon (6:57)

For me, what's been really unexpected is the health effects. I just didn't understand that. I mean, I remember in high school learning untruly that you couldn't be addicted to marijuana. And I think that idea and the kind of culture, the like, pretty benign culture of pot made me think that I didn't give a lot of thought to regulation. Right. I mean, there's always a distance from saying that something shouldn't be criminal anymore to deciding exactly what kind of place it's going to have in society. And I think that's what we were wrestling with as we've been working on this editorial. And it was kind of tricky for us to figure out how to frame it. David, can you talk a little bit about that?

David Leonhardt (7:38)

Yeah. And look, it's a really tricky issue because we. I want to be clear about this. We are reiterating our pro legalization positions. We say in the new editorial that we oppose this ballot initiative that Massachusetts citizens may be able to vote on this year that would essentially recriminalize marijuana. We don't think it should be recriminalized. Probably the biggest cost of the criminalization of marijuana, which is we ended up arresting large numbers of people for partaking in an activity that is not fundamentally different from consuming or selling alcohol and tobacco, both of which are obviously legal. Those arrests had long term costs, financial costs, job opportunities, costs, and the people who bore those costs were disproportionately poor, disproportionately black, and disproportionately Latino. And ending the criminalization of marijuana has meant that we have ended that form of injustice. And that is worth celebrating. But when you have a big new policy, and legalization of marijuana has been a big new policy, it's really important to step back and look at what the effects are. And just as Herman was saying, a lot of the effects have been bad. Use has gone way up, addiction has gone up, Illness associated with marijuana has gone up. And not only have those effects been bad, but they are quite different from what advocates predicted. And so what the three of us and our colleagues really grappled with was how do we get the balance right, where we simultaneously say, look, marijuana should be legal, Adults who want to use it should be able to use it. And also, let's acknowledge that legalization has had real downsides. And so then what do we do about that?

Herman Lopez (9:25)

Just to punctuate one thing, David, and you have said, Emily, is on this addiction point, I mean, you still see people who really are skeptical that you can get addicted. And I would just point out that when you look at the data on this, it is people saying on their own in national surveys that they have a problem with marijuana. They are basically saying that they want to stop using but cannot, and it's causing problems in their lives.

Emily Bazelon (9:50)

I mean, I feel like everybody knows at least one person for whom this is true. Right. It just seems like a pretty common phenomenon. So, David, you explained the position that the editorial board took in 2014. Our current editorial says governments can enact policies that keep the drug legal and try to curb its biggest downsides. So we're looking for this kind of middle ground of regulation. And one of the ways we've been talking about this is this idea of grudging toleration, which is a kind of Scrooge like phrase that is almost like mocks itself. But what's the ballast that we are looking for here? Herman, how do you think about where we've arrived and tell us about grudging toleration? Because it has a good origin story.

David Leonhardt (10:38)

Yeah.

Herman Lopez (10:39)

It comes from Mark Kleiman, criminologist. He used to write a lot on these issues. If you read any book on criminal justice, I think it should be When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman. And he was just looking at this topic of, well, we clearly don't like this punitive war on drugs, but we also don't like the idea of everybody just getting addicted to all these drugs. So what is the middle point? And he basically makes a point that just because you legalize something does not mean you have to embrace it. I don't mean just legal, I mean culturally too. So how do we balance these things? We already see this with tobacco. It's legal, but we restrict where people can use it. We have very high taxes on it. Same thing with alcohol. It's restricted. You can't drink and drive. It has relatively higher taxes, although I would say the taxes aren't high enough on alcohol. And then there's limitations on even where you can drink. Right. In a lot of places, you cannot have an open container. So with marijuana, we've really gone in a direction where the taxes are relatively low and the regulations are not as strict as I think a lot of initial proponents were thinking. And yeah, so we've kind of moved below that grudging toleration line, which, yes, it's a funny phrase, but it basically gets at that idea of like, look, you can tolerate something, you can make it legal, but you don't really have to think it should be a part of everyday life.

Emily Bazelon (11:59)

So, David, what are the specific policy ideas that you feel like are most promising for finding this maybe more grudging approach than a lot of states are currently taking once they've legalized marijuana?

David Leonhardt (12:12)

I think taxes is the place to start. And what I would say is that we've had huge success reducing tobacco use over the last few decades, and taxes have been absolutely central to that effort. We've made it much more expensive to smoke cigarettes and fewer people smoke cigarettes. And so by increasing the taxes on tobacco, we have really helped drive down cigarette use. And as Herman was just saying, taxes on marijuana are really quite low, cents on the dollar in some cases. And we should raise them the same way. We should say that as a society, we want to find ways to discourage excess use of alcohol and tobacco. We should be able to say we want to discourage excess use of marijuana. And another thing that should happen is we should tax marijuana based in part on its THC levels. That's the primary psychoactive compound in pot. And the same way the taxes are higher whiskey than they are on beer, taxes should be higher on stronger levels of marijuana than weaker levels. So I think taxes are really kind of a central way to do it. And as the three of us and our colleagues were talking about this, Herman made a really nice point, which is there's another beauty of taxes, which is that not only do they discourage excess use, but they're not that big a deal for the person who wants to have gummies a couple times a month or smoke a joint with friends on the weekend because they're not heavy users of it. And so the tax doesn't hit them really hard. From an economic standpoint, a tax is really well designed to discourage excess use, but not punish people who are using a product quite safely and getting enjoyment from it.

Emily Bazelon (13:59)

And what about medical marijuana? Do we need to rethink at all how we are currently handling that?

Herman Lopez (14:06)

I would say that people should step back and think about how medicine is supposed to work in the United States. So it is supposed to go through this regulatory process with the federal agencies involved, and it says yes or no whether a drug passes both safety and efficacy measures, and there's lots of rigorous testing involved. That has not happened at all with what's being sold in medical marijuana dispensaries. Because what's happened instead is state voters have said, and sometimes state legislators as well, have approved these initiatives where they say you can just sell marijuana at a dispensary and claim it provides XYZ medical use, really without any evidence. And I was really hopeful when a lot of this debate started that medical marijuana would help a lot of people. But based on the most rigorous studies we've seen, it actually does not have that great of benefits. For some people, it's good for pain, and maybe for some people, it helps them with, like, very specific issues. But the overall, when you compare it to other medications or just not using pot, it really doesn't work as well as we thought. So I think we should just step back and wonder, should we really have all these dispensaries claiming, without evidence that medical marijuana does all these great things? I mean, I don't think we would accept it with a Lot of other medications, and we probably shouldn't accept it with marijuana either.

Emily Bazelon (15:22)

So one big development since legalization is that marijuana has become a multi billion dollar industry that is sort of like in some kind of gray area of legal and not exactly legal, but we really are in an era of big weed. Herman, how does that fit into how we should think about regulation?

Herman Lopez (15:41)

I think if you're a good liberal, you think a lot about like, well, you know, personal liberty, personal freedoms. People should be able to use what they want, like consume what they want. But corporations have a lot of incentives to market their products irresponsibly, to really push people to misuse them, use them as much as possible. And that's really not any different with weed. They make most of their revenue from the heaviest users. And we should just think, is that something we want these corporations doing? Marketing their addictive products to really, really heavy users?

David Leonhardt (16:17)

And not just heavy users, but kids and teenagers. I mean, there are products called Trips Ahoy, which obviously evokes Chips Ahoy and Double Stuff Stonio evoking Oreos. And this is classic playbook of corporations that care much more about their own profits and by extension their executive salaries than the well being of Americans.

Herman Lopez (16:42)

I was just going to say one thing that's worth emphasizing. You were getting at this, Emily. It is an illegal gray area right now because technically marijuana is federally illegal. So it's much more difficult for companies to market their products in this way. You see beer ads in the Super Bowl. That's not going to happen with pop because it's literally illegal on a national level. So it's the time to really start thinking through regulations and what we want these companies to be able to do when they're out there marketing their products.

Emily Bazelon (17:08)

All right, so if we move into this world of heavier regulation that you're envisioning, does that just push a lot of the market for pot back into the illegal black market? Because obviously that still exists. Right. And the harder you make it or the more expensive you make it to get something legally, don't you risk just like going back to the world of, you know, underground dealers?

David Leonhardt (17:30)

So there is some of that risk there. But this is one of the things that on the editorial board we actually end up talking about a lot. It is true that no law is perfect and sometimes things will go to the margin. But to then argue that therefore we should not have laws ends up being really nihilist. And it actually ends up being this technique that people who don't want any regulation use often Corporate lobbyists and lobbyists for wealthy people say we shouldn't tax rich people or increase taxes on rich people because they'll find ways to get around. So let's step back and ask ourselves, well, wait a second, if they would actually be able to find ways to get around all the tax increases, why are they so upset about the tax increases? Why are they lobbying against them? It turns out actually that when you raise taxes on rich people, you raise taxes on rich people. And the same thing goes with marijuana, which is if we crack down on some of these abuses, yes, some of it will move to the black market and we'll then need to look for ways to restrict that. But the, the bigger dynamic will be that essentially harmful behavior by companies will be less common. And so I think we shouldn't be scared of putting in place a law because it won't have 100% efficacy.

Emily Bazelon (18:44)

So one of the things that I've been thinking is about whether marijuana is a vice in the kind of Old fashioned 19th century Social reform version of a vice, where you had an anti vice squad in New York City going around like looking for racy playing cards and anything else that appeared to them to be what people then called obscene, and maybe now we would think of as pornography. Marijuana is a vice. We've been talking about some other topics on the editorial board that could fit that definition that have addictive qualities also, like sports gambling or pornography or even social media. Is there something helpful in this framing of this middle ground of regulation that could also apply more broadly and at the same time, like, do we risk in kind of reviving this category of vice, falling into the 19th century trap of Victorian morality where we're not really thinking about harm, we're more just like disapproving of things.

Herman Lopez (19:44)

I, I don't want to go around like moral grandstanding and telling people that like, you know, reefer madness is real and they are a bad person for smoking pot? Because I just don't believe that at all. But it is also the case that with these drugs, we have long accepted the idea that some people do get in trouble, and when they get in trouble, it hurts all of us and we should do what we can to prevent that from happening.

David Leonhardt (20:07)

I'm willing to do a little bit of moral grandstanding and maybe inspire some disagreement from the two of you. Yes, smoking pot is a vice. So is drinking alcohol, which is something I very much enjoy doing, and so is smoking tobacco, and so are a whole bunch of other activities. That doesn't mean that people who do these activities are bad people to echo Hermann. But it does mean that you want to be honest about the trade offs here. So I would say to your question, Emily. Yes, smoking pot is a vice. The same way drinking a martini, which I very much enjoy, is a vice. It is a perfectly good thing for people to do in some circumstances or. But when you add it up over society, it has costs that we've been too eager to wish away with marijuana over the last 15 years.

Herman Lopez (20:59)

One thing I wanted to do is also just flip this a bit because in some ways, the way you have seen marijuana portrayed in the last few decades, it's not just that it's not a vice, but it's a literal virtue. Like it has medical properties that are good. You see people celebrating its use. I mean, it's not hard to find a celebrity who is like boasting that they use pot every day. Now I would just ask people to think, what if somebody was saying that about like alcohol, like, I'm getting drunk every single day. What would you think about that? I think you would start thinking that person has a problem and something is wrong here because intuitively we understand that, like, look, there are limits to how much we should be celebrating this thing, even if it's legal. And I think the same applies to marijuana here, especially in a cultural sense. I think we've gone way too far in glorifying its use.

Emily Bazelon (21:50)

Yeah, it's such a ping pong back and forth. I mean, I think an additional element here is that when marijuana was criminal, the criminalization did enormous damage. Right. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were getting arrested, going to jail, sometimes like serving actual prison sentences. So in some ways I feel like we've gone too far in the other direction because that was such a clear social harm. We needed a way out. And making marijuana seem super benign and maybe even positive was a way to change those laws. And now maybe, at least in states that have legalized pot, we're in a different place. And there's enough recognition of that past harm. I hope that we can figure out how to find this middle ground of regulation without risking going backwards into the world of sending people to jail, which seemed really problematic and just did a lot of damage to the last thing I really wanted to talk about, which is like this whole question of trade offs. I mean, they're just unavoidable in policymaking. Right? You're never going to get it exactly right. There always are some harms that you're causing or failing to mitigate by going in One direction rather than the other. You know, legalization was really important for reducing arrests and jails, and yet it also seems like it had this somewhat unexpected effect of greater use and more health problems. How should we be thinking about that going forward applied to this problem, but then also to other kinds of social ills or vices that we want to try to find this middle ground for?

Herman Lopez (23:23)

You know, I think a lot of people might hear this conversation we're having and think, look at these three narcs, and they are hating marijuana and all that.

Emily Bazelon (23:30)

And I always like to think of myself as a narc. That's my favorite self image.

Herman Lopez (23:34)

But. But it's just by the nature of this editorial and by the nature of this conversation, we are talking a lot about why we're making the case for regulation. But. But all three of us are supporters of legalization. We think marijuana should have been legalized. Like, I partake. I'm cool. Like, it's not just that.

Emily Bazelon (23:51)

Are you though? Anyway, keep going.

Herman Lopez (23:54)

Fair enough. But it's not just that. We're like people who oppose marijuana legalization to begin with, and we're coming back and saying, look, we hate this. No, I am like reviled by like this original statistics where hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, especially people of color, and then they had criminal records for lives tied to this drug that really was not doing enough harm to justify that kind of prohibition. But I think the advocates said for a long time, legalize and regulate. And I think we really need to take the second part of that seriously.

Emily Bazelon (24:28)

Thank you guys. Thank you both for helping me think about this and talking this through.

Herman Lopez (24:32)

Thanks for having me.

David Leonhardt (24:33)

Thank you.

Show Host (24:53)

If you like this show, follow it on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. The opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Allison Bruzick. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro, Efim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samuel. The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

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