This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 5th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One big loser this election cycle, drug prohibition, as states and one district spanning the political spectrum

moved to either decriminalize or legalize not just cannabis but other drugs as

well. Cato's Walter Olson discusses the range of initiatives presented to voters this year

and how they turned out. The big story at least from the ballot initiatives

was the wide variety of places and specific

technical details of reducing once again prohibition on drugs.

That was in fact one of the big trends.

It was amazing how successful those propositions and initiatives were to back off of the drug war.

They were successful in liberal states and conservative states.

They were successful on recreational marijuana and mushrooms and related substances and on in Oregon

more broadly for drugs. So we have a lot of movement and I'm not aware of a single one that went down to defeat of the many that were high profile ballot measures around the country.

In Oregon specifically it seems like these were pretty well thought out when they moved to legalize

so-called magic mushrooms, they have given the Oregon Health Authority a couple of years to write

licensing and regulation rules for what they call silosibbon,

silosibbon surface centers for people 21 years old and over and of course they've

decriminalized broadly the consumption of fairly small amounts of all illegal drugs.

And that last one is politically really pretty amazing.

I mean, those of us on the Libertarian side have gone through pretty much our whole lives until recently being told it's

politically impractical, you know, don't even bother arguing the practicalities as in Portugal

of doing it. The public will never accept it, it will never be a majority issue and the politicians know that.

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