This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 26, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone as far as just about any U.S. official in admitting the failure of American drug policies.

But there is not much evidence, at least not yet, that the United States will change course

on the overall war on drugs being waged domestically and internationally.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Doug Bandow.

History doesn't give us very many examples of successful

interdiction and stopping this sort of thing.

I mean, you go back to alcohol prohibition,

lots of stuff came in over the Canadian border.

Chicago was overrun with corruption and violence.

I mean, it was the nature of the the beast if you had this high

demand for a product which frankly most people thought was you know no problem in

using they were going to violate the law. We've seen this kind of thing in other countries.

You know, Colombia, we've had a plan Colombia,

lots of money going in.

And while they've had some impact on some drugs,

overall drug production and overall drug shipments have increased.

You look at Afghanistan, we've got the same kind of problem.

You know, how do you stop it there?

They're talking about trying to involve the US military.

But I mean, again, high demand for the product a lot of

money being paid very low opportunity for farmers in terms of growing other things

...