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Hi listeners. It's Lindsay Smith-Rogers. Today, cannabis, cannabis, cannabis.

Professor Yasmin Hurd is the director of the Addiction Institute at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Professor Douglas Berman is Director of Drug Enforcement Policy Center and professor at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

They recently served on a blue ribbon panel on the public

health and medical consequences of cannabis policy. They speak with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about what

that panel found. Let's listen. Professor Yasmin Hurd, Professor Douglas Berman, thank you so much

for joining me today in Public Health on Call to talk about

cannabis. How are you doing today? Great. Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you.

So I want to start with a question that's a little bit embarrassing for me to ask, but I just want to

see whether you could tell me what's actually going on with cannabis policy in the United States.

I've followed it here and there over the last

few years, but not particularly recently. I know there have been some state policy changes,

particularly. Can I start with you, Professor Berman, since you're the lawyer?

Absolutely. And it's an incredibly complicated story that I could go on and on about. But

try to do it in short form, about 30 years ago, California became the first state to legalize what we generally call medical marijuana, and then a number of states followed that lead. And then about a little more than 10 years ago, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize what we often call recreational or adult use marijuana, and a number of states followed in their wake.

So there's now currently about 38 states that have legalized what we call medical marijuana, 24 states that have legalized adult use marijuana access.

But during that whole period, there's been prohibition under federal law,

though I should be specific about THC products. Looking back to 2018, federal law did update in one

...