He's worked under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in the Office of National Drug Control Policy and goes around touting drug reform. He's the modern-day version of a Prohibitionist. Sabet is Public Enemy Number One when it comes to legalizing marijuana in any way. And while he's known nationally and has taken his fight to places like Colorado, he's parked right in our own backyard as the director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida.
Through his group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana (or, Project SAM), Sabet, who calls himself the "quarterback" of a new antidrug movement, has become an expert at making it sound like marijuana is Satan's Herb. Through clever semantics and an aggressive approach, Sabet's M.O. has been to be intellectually dishonest about pot by touting nonsense such as today's weed is more potent than the weed your parents smoked in the '50s and '60s or that weed rots your brain.
He also uses buzzwords and scare tactics, so as to not sound like an evil conservative, by calling medical marijuana and dispensary industries "the new big tobacco."
And Sabet has already thrown himself into the fight in Florida, going after the recent bipartisan bill that would legalize a light-strain medical marijuana known as Charlotte's Web that would help certain children who suffer with epilepsy. In a "fact sheet" Sabet put out, he claims that these children don't need Charlotte's Web because they're able to get an FDA-approved drug called Epidiolex.