Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson. I'm the editor of City

Journal.

Joining me on today's show is my colleague, Stephen Malangay, has been on many times.

He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal's senior editor.

He writes about a host of policy issues, including state and local governance, economics, immigration, and much else.

His work has appeared regularly in the Wall Street Journal, as well as City Journal and other outlets. So today we're going

to be discussing his feature essay from our latest issue, our winter issue. It's called Gone to Pot,

and it's on the failures of our experiment with widespread pot legalization or

marijuana legalization. So Steve, great to have you on. Good to be here. So pot's now legal in,

I think, around half the country. Advocates promised many benefits from this with few downsides.

Their argument was that marijuana was already in wide use and it was

known to be safe. So I wonder what are we seeing initially over the period in which legalization

has taken place in terms of that safety question? And how was the pro-legalization lobby so

successful in getting the public on board with this agenda?

Well, you know, let's start with the way they promoted legalization was basically that we need an end to the

punitive treatment of those people who smoke pot. they shouldn't, for instance, be arrested.

This would be especially beneficial in minority communities because too many minorities were

being arrested for pot usage. Since pot was kind of accepted in the black market, if we legalized

it, what we would do is we would regulate it so that it would be

better regulated because it would be legal, and that also states would benefit from revenues that

came from this. Basically, it wouldn't necessarily mean, since pot is widely available, they said,

it wouldn't necessarily mean that more people would start smoking it if it were

...