Emily Bazelon

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?

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 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.