David Leonhardt

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 Hermann 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?

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 Hermann was just saying, taxes on marijuana are really quite low, cents on the dollar in some cases, and we should raise them.