Emily Bazelon

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.

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.