This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Legalizing marijuana is now considerably more popular than President Obama.

And that revelation comes at a time when the Obama Justice Department and other executive

agencies are threatening states and dispensaries and even patients engaged in legal activity.

Rob Kempia is Executive Director of the Marijuana Protection. and hires Gil Kirlikowski to be his director of O and DCP.

Seems like things are moving in a right direction,

says that he's not going to crack down on medical marijuana in states where it has been designated to be legal and for a

while it seemed like he had a policy win at least in terms of like the people who strongly supported him.

But what's happened since then?

Yeah, well for the first two and a half years of the Obama administration he was doing the

popular thing and the right thing, which was to have

the federal government mostly bow out of the business of interfering with medical marijuana.

And then things just kind of unraveled a few months ago.

And with previous presidents, you know,

it was always a competition for who could be the worst

on the medical marijuana issue.

And one president after another

would just become worse and uh... with obama we thought we finally had respite

as it turns out uh... he's his uh... law enforcement folks are actually more engaged and more aggressive than even

you know Bush number two

uh... so specifically what that means is that

...