David Leonhardt

Hi.

Hello, Emily.

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.

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

That's true.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, and look, it's a really tricky issue because we, I want to be clear about this, we are reiterating our pro-legalization position.

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.