Emily Bazelon

David, can you talk a little bit about that?

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, Hermann?

How do you think about where we've arrived?

And tell us about Grudging Toleration because it has a good origin story.

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?

And what about medical marijuana?

Do we need to rethink at all how we are currently handling that?

So one big development since legalization is that marijuana has become a multibillion 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.

Hermann, how does that fit into how we should think about regulation?

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.