Emily Bazelon

Is there something helpful in this framing of this middle ground of regulation that could also apply more broadly to

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.

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.

So 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?

I always like to think of myself as a narc.

I don't know.