Dear Mr. Sabet,

I hope this message finds you well. I’m writing as an American who strongly supports personal liberty and who has followed the marijuana policy debate for years. I respectfully ask you to reconsider your prohibitionist position—not out of anger, but because the core issue is bigger than any study, statistic, or industry talking point.

The elephant in the room is simple: In a free country, the government should not be in the business of deciding what adult citizens may or may not put into their own bodies, provided they are not harming others. That principle is the foundation of the American experiment. Prohibition of a plant that millions of responsible adults use safely (and many use medicinally) violates that principle outright. No amount of public-health data can justify the state treating peaceful adults like criminals for a choice that is fundamentally private.

We regulate alcohol, tobacco, and prescription opioids—all of which carry well-documented lethal risks and have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths—while holding people accountable for misuse. Marijuana, by contrast, has never killed even one person in over 5,000 years of recorded human use. **It therefore deserves the same adult-treatment standard: full personal freedom and responsibility rather than criminal prohibition. No new regulations need to be created that regulate nothing; such schemes only allow greedy politicians and special interests to line their pockets on the backs of the citizens they are supposed to serve.**

I know you cite concerns about youth use, impaired driving, mental-health risks, and product potency. Those deserve honest discussion and smart, targeted measures (such as age limits and public education) to protect public safety. But the blunt instrument of prohibition has already failed on its own terms: it created black markets, wasted billions in enforcement, filled prisons with non-violent offenders, and denied suffering patients (cancer patients, veterans with PTSD, chronic-pain sufferers) a tool that many find more effective and safer than the pharmaceuticals it protects. The propaganda of the Reefer Madness era was indeed fueled in part by competing industries (liquor, cotton, timber, and later pharma). That history is well-documented. Whatever the original motives, today’s policy still inflicts needless suffering on people who simply want a safer, natural option.

The window for changing minds is closing fast. More states have legalized, more voters have seen the results with their own eyes, and federal prohibition is increasingly indefensible. When the last remnants of that policy fall, the focus will shift from “should we ban it?” to “how do we respect adult liberty while still protecting kids?” I hope you will be part of shaping that smarter future rather than defending a position that history is leaving behind.

I’m not asking you to become a cheerleader for legalization. I’m asking you to acknowledge the liberty argument as the decisive one and to pivot toward evidence-based policies that protect kids while fully respecting adult freedom and personal responsibility. Reasonable people can disagree on the details, but the principle of freedom should be non-negotiable.

I would genuinely welcome a public dialogue on this. Americans are waking up; let’s make sure the conversation is grounded in liberty, facts, and compassion instead of fear.

Thank you for your time and for the work you do. I look forward to your thoughts.

Best regards,
Troy Danella
@tdanella25

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