 Maybe it would make sense for America to actually leapfrog places like Europe and Canada and go for all legalization. And Nick was sharing this piece with me earlier by the late Dan Baum in Harper's magazine called Legalize It All. And I thought this could be a way to kick off this conversation. He writes that just about everybody who thinks seriously about the end of drug prohibition agrees that we'll want to discourage consumption. I mean, we can put that aside for a second. But the goal could be accomplished, at least in part, under a system of regulated for-profit stores by setting limits on advertising and promotion for banning them or banning them altogether, by preventing marketing to children, by establishing minimum distances from schools for retail outlets, by nailing down the rules about dosage and purity, and by limiting both the number of stores and their hours of operation. And so Baum here is basically proposing treat these hypothetical all-you-can-buy drug stores the same way you might treat a highly regulated liquor store. Does that strike you as a plausible and good model? Well, I mean, first of all, politically, I think it's neither here nor there. I just don't see the support. I mean, as we point out before his act, even as the numbers rose from marijuana legalization and now in psychedelics, we're not seeing the same type of change. I think the one, the country that comes closest to be open to that sort of model, maybe Switzerland, actually, where the numbers have been a 35, 40% in the past, but even there, they're accustomed to having a fairly hyper-regulatory system. And so they might, and they've had a lot of success in varying ways with that sort of system. There's a greater cultural tolerance for it. The United States, we don't have the kind of tolerance for those sorts of models. I mean, periodically we had, you know, post-prohibition with states having, you know, liquor monopolies and things like that, but it's not the kind of thing that one can see really working in America where we tend to veer between moralistic, prohibitionist extremes on the one hand or like, let it all roll, you know, like, you know, you look at European, they want to legalize gambling. They still, you know, the casinos are regulated. They, you know, the state lottoes and all this or thing. In the United States, when we go from prohibition legalization, you know, we start, you know, having casinos open 24 seven with all sorts of incentives to, you know, keep gambling and stuff. And we do start doing lotto and we're hiring ad companies design ads that specifically appeal to addictive personalities. I mean, so we don't do that middle ground thing. Secondly, I'll tell you, one of my principle ways of thinking about legalization, it gives me pause, is I think about, you know, what some people would oftentimes describe as the three most powerful addictive and omnipresent drugs in human society. And what are those? Sugar fat, salt, sugar fat, salt, sugar fat, salt, right? Now you look at what sort of multinational food producing companies have been able to do on that front, right? Where they're doing stuff with brain chemistry and they're figuring out the exact combinations of the sensual taste in the mouth and the texture and the sugar fat, salt combinations, you know, where junk food, not just because of what they're producing, but has become enormously popular in all sorts of ways and appealing. And, you know, it's especially an issue with poorer people, but this is becoming more and more of a universal phenomenon, not just the United States, right? And you see that obesity, the consequences of obesity, the estimate now is possible that obesity now results in a greater loss of life and of, you know, dollars lost than does either smoking or all illicit drugs put together, right? So, and that's happened quite dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years. So, if I begin to imagine a legal system where pharmaceutical companies can, you know, do what the food companies have been doing and sort of be coming up with all sorts of neat drug combinations that specifically generate some level of dependence, but don't do that much harm, at least in the short-term and da-da-da, that's my great fear about what could happen there. When I look at a model for legalization, the one that I think comes closest is one that actually- Before you go on there, let me just ask, if that is your fear, would that actually be a worse situation than we are in right now, given the level of death that is happening from fentanyl, which is the fact that fentanyl is on the streets is purely a byproduct of the black market. Well, that's the right questions, Zach. How do we compare these relative risks, right? And in fact, 30 years ago, I put through the working group at Princeton, the Princeton Working Group on the Future of Drug Use and Alternative Drug Prohibition. And I published a piece called, Thinking Seriously About Alternative Drug Prohibition in the journal, the academic journal, Deadless, 30 years ago, which really hashed out all of these, so you can find it online, but it's really hashed out all these issues. How do we balance the competing values at stake, including the question that you just posed, right? Now, the question is, is would that in fact solve the fentanyl issue? It might, it might do that. If you had asked me the same question four or five years ago, or maybe four or five years from now, if the fentanyl issue diminishes a lot, would that change the calculation? But Zach, the thing I would point out is, there is actually a model that emerged and was actually enacted into law, but never implemented. And about 10, 15 years ago, New Zealand had a major problem with synthetic cannabinoids, right? And people were getting in trouble with it, stores were popping up unregulated, and what eventually happened was the two biggest manufacturers of the synthetic cannabinoids, which was kind of not legally regulated, but not illegal, they approached the government and the health ministry. And they said, we have a mutual interest here. We know our products are relatively safe. We've done the testing, but we don't like all these fly-by-night companies and all these pop-up retail outlets. And so, and we have a mutual interest in getting rid of these. So what they proposed and what New Zealand Parliament enacted with like 110 to one vote was a system setting up basically an FDA-like editing that where pharmaceutical companies or anybody could submit a drug that they had created to this new FDA-like entity. And if they could establish a substantial margin of safety, the government would approve it for over-the-counter retail sale to adults, even though it had no accepted medical use. So it was like the FDA thing without requiring medical use, just showing substantial margin of safety. And the people behind that, including in the government, understood that what they were proposing to do for synthetic cannabis might well be a model that could apply more broadly to all other drugs as well. Now, unfortunately, the law was never implemented for ridiculous reasons when people caring about animal rights protested. They didn't want to have drugs being tested on animals and all things shut down. But the fact is the drug that law is still on the books, the United Nations Control Board and our Congress Control Board which normally freaks out about any reform didn't really quite know what to do about it. So I think that's a potential regulatory model which might make a lot of sense. And remember also, it's also about like if you're gonna legalize cocaine, are you gonna legalize it only in a kind of cocaine, coca-tea version which has cocaine in it? Or like chewing gums and sodas like liquid forms? Are you gonna legalize the sale of 10% pure potency powder for snorting? Are you gonna allow it to be sold in injectable or smokable forms? If you only allow it to be sold in the less potent forms, would you then crack down on people who are selling it, turn cocaine that they bought at a pharmacy or a store into crack? Would you then crack down on them for selling it in the pre-made crack forms? So I mean, the organization in the UK transform, you put up one of their slides before and their public policy specialist Steve Rolls, R-O-L-L-E-S. He was the last of my 80 interviews on my podcast, Psychoactive. He's really done some of the most advanced thinking on this stuff. He's an ITism about being sort of a hyper regulator, which is true, but he's actually thinking hard about what regulatory models might make sense for what sorts of drugs and they have a new volume that came out in the last year about how to legalize stimulants, which is the hardest. We can figure it out for cannabis psychedelics, maybe even for opioids, but the stimulant drugs are the ones that cocaine and methamphetamine are the really, really tricky, challenging ones. You would agree though that movements towards, with almost no exceptions, movements towards decriminalization and legalization are to be preferred over the status quo or a rollback of that. Yeah, I mean, almost totally. I mean, the thing is, look, one of the great advantages of legalization to the extent that legalization is synonymous with legal regulation, and that's something that some old fashioned libertarians recoil at, but when you define legalization as legal regulation, what arguments I typically made is that people think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation, when in fact prohibition represents the application of regulation. Anything that's not being effectively prohibited is basically lies outside and is totally unregulated, controlled by gangsters, criminals, blah, blah, blah. So when it means, when legalization is synonymous with legal regulation, and when that legal regulation is pragmatic, not overly heavy-handed, not dumb, which inevitably regulations become dumb and backward in some areas, but where the essence of it is constructive and conforms to local culture, well, I think that is almost always a step forward. Right? We don't want underground synthetic drugs being sold. We don't want the latest- Well, you don't want them to be underground, but maybe you want them to be sold, but then the people who sell them, if they're acting in open daylight, they can be found, they can be sued, they can be held responsible. Right, you want civil liability, exactly. It's one of the great benefits of a legal regulatory system is you have civil liability for the harms that are caused. And some synthetic cannabinoids may be perfectly fine, other things, but the stuff where people are using now with a xylazine, this other tranquilizer drug out of Columbia that's being mixed with fentanyl and beginning to merge from Philadelphia, you don't want that crap there. But I know what you're saying, and this goes back to the kind of Thomas Sa's worldview, which is beautiful and powerful in its simplicity. But when I say I would like to live in a world where all drugs are treated like beer, wine, and alcohol, often from my fellow libertarians, I'll be told that I'm awful because I'm asking for new taxes and new regulations to be written. And it's kind of like, yeah, I guess so, but in the big picture, are you fucking kidding? My perception is this is a substantial evolution in the libertarian, both libertarian and political libertarian, where they no longer say prohibition and taxation are the same thing, with an understanding. And part of that's political pragmatism, that marijuana has been such a great success and you realize that has to come. And part of this matter that the way you tax, how you tax the levels you tax make a huge difference. California got the taxation system all messed up. There are better and worse ways to do this stuff. And then ultimately prohibition represents its own form of tax and it's a far more onerous one. Thanks for watching that excerpt of a live stream that Zach Weismiller and I did with Ethan Natelman, late of the Drug Policy Alliance, about legalizing all drugs. If you wanna watch another excerpt, go here. If you wanna watch the full conversation, go here. And come back next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time because every week we've got a live stream with another great guest that you're gonna be into. Thanks for watching.