German Lopez

And I was really hopeful when a lot of this debate started that medical marijuana would help a lot of people.

But based on the most rigorous studies we've seen, it actually does not have that great of benefits.

For some people, it's good for pain and pain.

Maybe for some people, it helps them with very specific issues.

But overall, when you compare it to other medications or just not using pot, it really doesn't work as well as we thought.

So I think we should just step back and wonder, should we really have all these dispensaries claiming without evidence that medical marijuana does all these great things?

I mean, I don't think we would accept it with a lot of other medications, and we probably shouldn't accept it with marijuana either.

I think if you're a good liberal, you think a lot about like, well, you know, personal liberty, personal freedoms, people should be able to use what they want, like consume what they want.

But corporations have a lot of incentives to market their products irresponsibly, to really push people to misuse them, use them as much as possible.

And that's really not any different with weed.

They make most of their revenue from the heaviest users.

And

We should just think, is that something we want these corporations doing?

Marketing their addictive products to really, really heavy users?

I was just going to say, one thing that's worth emphasizing, you were going to get this, Emily, it is an illegal gray area right now because technically marijuana is federally illegal.

So it's much more difficult for companies to market their products in the way, you know, you see beer ads in the Super Bowl.

That's not going to happen with pop because it's literally illegal on a national level.

So it's the time to really start thinking through regulations and what we want these companies to be able to do when they're out there marketing their products.

I don't want to go around like moral grandstanding and telling people that like, you know, reefer madness is real and they are a bad person for smoking pop because I just don't believe that at all.

But it is also the case that with these drugs, we have long accepted the idea that some people do get in trouble and when they get in trouble, it hurts all of us and we should do what we can to prevent that from happening.