Is Legalizing Pot A Bad Idea? A Published Email Exchange With David Frum

If you think weed should be legal, then David Frum, one of the leading intellectual voices against legalization of marijuana, will attempt to set you straight.

During my 3L year, Professor Barry Friedman organized a very popular series of debates, panels, and fireside chats that he moderated for students. I attended as many of these as I could and I have told Professor Friedman how much I enjoyed them. One of these panels explored the issue of marijuana legalization, and I remember being struck by the fact that there was little if any debate on the question of “should we legalize marijuana.” On this question, each of the panelists answered yes. My other takeaway was the panel’s insistence was that we had reached a tipping point in legalization. This was in 2010, before Colorado and Washington, before companies like Leafly (Yelp for weed), and before ATL was hosting a marijuana law reception in Denver on June 16th.

I have been a dinner party proponent of pot legalization for a while, but I am also wary of policies that become popular too quickly and the law of unintended consequences (see, e.g., net neutrality). So I started doing some research to find out who are the intellectual voices against legalization of marijuana, and I came across this article in Commentary by David Frum, a Harvard Law grad, a speech writer for George W. Bush, senior editor at The Atlantic, and chairman of Policy Exchange, a leading think tank in the U.K. I am thrilled that David has accepted my invitation to speak with me this week to dissect and debate this important issue in a public setting.


Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder of ReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.

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