This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, April 20th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The end of the Blanket Federal Prohibition on Cannabis may be closer than ever now that the president has quietly endorsed the end of

interference in state marijuana laws, but as you might expect

congressional action is well behind public opinion.

Trevor Burris a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

discusses the current state of federal marijuana policy.

John Boehner was Speaker of the U.S. House

and presided over continued marijuana prohibition and he said recently that

my thinking on cannabis has evolved and he is now going to be working with a group called

acreage holdings along with Bill Weld who was the governor of Massachusetts and

was the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 2016 to

argue they're arguing for a shift in federal marijuana policy and it's and along with some of the other things we're going to discuss,

this has been a pretty rapid transition and it's become, it seems like it's becoming more rapid

in terms of how public officials, some of whom, almost all of whom are out of office and at least one of whom is in office have talked about it. So on Boehner making this shift,

what do you think led up to that or what do you what do you think this represents?

I've scratched my head for a long time about why politicians seem to be unable to at least many of them to come out in favor of relooking at marijuana, looking at the science of marijuana, or maybe just legalizing it because it

doesn't really track public opinion. First we have medical marijuana coming in

really particularly in the late in the mid 90s and we still have a schedule one marijuana that said there are no medical uses

despite states continually allowing medical marijuana use and we have this idea that

politicians tend to track their polls and look at what

voters want and a lot of times voters at least 80% according to some polls

...