Classroom debates used to be familiar exercises to students schooled in past generations. In this article, the authors describe the technique called "intimate debate". To cooperative learning specialists, the technique is known as "structured debate" or "constructive debate". It is a powerful method for dealing with case topics that involve controversy, such as whether to legalize marijuana, provide federal funding for cloning research, legalize euthanasia, abandon the Hubble space telescope, or permit intelligent design to be taught in the science classroom. Furthermore, the authors present an outline of the intimate debate approach, and an example of support materials that could be used to debate the issue of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. Thus, the authors state that to strengthen the value of the debates, the teacher can explain the activity to students in advance, and ask them to do their own research on the pros and cons of an issue prior to the class. (Contains 4 figures.)