How to Legalize Pot

Bill Keller
The New York Times (US)
Sunday, May 19, 2013

pot-legalizationThe first time I talked to Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at UCLA, was in 2002, and he explained why legalization of marijuana was a bad idea. “At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law,” Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.