Welcome back to 10 blocks. This is Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal.

Coming up on the show today, I talk with our senior editor, Steve Malanga, about his piece in the upcoming spring 2019 issue of City Journal, The Marijuana Delusion.

You can find it on our website, and we'll link to it in the description.

We'll have more news next week about some of the great essays you can expect in the spring issue, so make sure you stay tuned for that. is your host for today, Seth Barron, associate editor for City Journal.

Stephen Malanga is a senior editor at City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

His latest piece in the spring issue of City Journal is called The Marijuana Delusion. Thank you for

joining us, Steve. Well, you're welcome, and I'm glad you clarified this is the official podcast of

City Journal, because I'm sure there are all these pirate podcasts out there.

There's too many of them to name.

Stealing our trademark.

So there's a national trend toward the legalization of marijuana.

Now, given its medicinal powers and the extent to which marijuana laws have contributed to mass incarceration, isn't this trend a cause

for celebration?

Well, the problem is neither of the things that you said happened to be true.

Number one is there's very little evidence that there's any medicinal purpose to marijuana.

It's important to understand that 30 states that have all legalized medical marijuana

have done it through either ballot initiative or through legislation.

They haven't done it in the traditional way.

Marijuana has never gone through the kind of testing that any pharmaceutical goes through and its powers, its therapeutic powers,

have never been proved other than the fact as one prominent researcher from Sloan Kettering,

Memorial Sloan Kettering wrote recently in the Walser Journal, other than the fact that it gets

you high and anything that gets you high makes you necessarily experience less pain. As this researcher said in the piece he wrote

...