German Lopez

So it's been legalized where I'm at, which is Ohio.

And definitely once legalization took off, you just saw more people using it in public, right?

I actually was walking to the grocery store and somebody offered me a hit earlier in public.

And I was just like, 20 years ago, this absolutely would not have happened.

So it's definitely been a dramatic shift.

I mean, this is like something that I just keep thinking about.

It's one thing to apologize.

legalize a drug but it's another thing to culturally embrace it and I think we have really culturally embraced it in a way that that has surprised me like you've seen Gwyneth Paltrow invest into big weed in California and that's really the biggest thing that's changed is there's just much more public support for it in a cultural sense not even just a legal sense David what are your thoughts about this

I was going to mock myself.

I remember making fun of Maureen Dowd's experience with an edible and then going to Colorado and having basically the exact same experience where I was like sitting in a bed, just in a state of panic, just completely shocked that this was so much stronger than anything I had been used to because I used when I was a teenager more often and I just was not expecting it at all.

Yeah.

So, I mean, when I started writing about this topic, the younger, more naive me, I really did buy into a lot of the legalization arguments.

I thought marijuana was already pretty accessible.

It's not like it was particularly difficult to get before.

So how much can legalization possibly increase use?

I thought that the country would regulate it in a much more serious way than it has.

I mean, I just had a hard time believing that

the country would move from criminal prohibition to just very hands-off commercialization that easily.

I would say that I started having my doubts fairly early because I was also covering the opioid crisis, and that is an actual example of a legal drug being marketed irresponsibly and the government really underreacting to it.

So that was a first hint that, look, maybe this legalization regulation thing doesn't work exactly as it's sold.