Kevin Sabet

Kevin Abraham Sabet (born February 20, 1979) is an American drug policy scholar, who served as a White House Office of National Drug Control Policy advisor. He is the only person appointed to that office in both Republican (George W. Bush) and Democratic (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) administrations. Sabet is also an assistant professor adjunct at Yale University Medical School, a fellow at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and a columnist at Newsweek.

With Patrick J. Kennedy, Sabet co-founded Smart Approaches to Marijuana in Denver in January 2013, which has emerged as the leading opponent of marijuana legalization in the United States. Upon founding SAM, Salon called Sabet "the quarterback of the new anti-drug movement" and NBC News called him a "prodigy of drug politics". Rolling Stone called him one of marijuana legalization's biggest enemies.

Sabet is the author of numerous articles and monographs including the book Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths About Marijuana, now in its second edition, and his newest book, Smokescreen, is distributed by Simon & Schuster. His third book One Nation Under the Influence, will be published by Wiley and Polity, in the US in September 2025.

Sabet is the recipient of the Nils Bejerot Award given in conjunction with Queen Silvia of Sweden and was one of four Americans (along with Jonathan Caulkins, Bertha Madras, and Robert DuPont) invited to advise Pope Francis by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences to discuss marijuana and other drug policy. He spoke in front of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and others at the Allen and Company Sun Valley Investor's Conference in 2018 and is a regular attendee; he was seen at Sun Valley in one of his first public appearances since 2020 with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in 2021.