This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 13, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Reforming drug policy is a bipartisan issue.

So says Bob Barr, former Republican U.S. representative and Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

He spoke at a Cato Institute Capitol Hill briefing held July 7, 2009. The full event is at Cato.org.

If we were talking about a company and you had a board of directors or a CEO of a company, a CEO that a

company and you had a board of directors or a CEO of a company that went back year after year after year

after year to his or her board of directors and said you know probably, we have as many people that are not buying our products

now as before.

We haven't been able to increase our bottom line.

Our market share continues down.

We're spending more money. but keep me in office, keep, vote me back in as

the CEO, give me more money and I promise that next time I come before you we'll show some

improvement. You do that year after year after year and

sooner or later at least prior to the economic and financial environment that

we're dealing with the Washington is dealing with now that CEO would have been laughed out of

there. In the real world out there if you have a policy that costs more and more and

is less and less effective, changes do come.

Yet of course here in Washington inside the beltway,

it's a very different world.

Doesn't operate that way.

But more and more, particularly in these economic times when people are

looking very hard at those appropriations and those earmarks, I think it becomes

...