This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 4, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Fans of Barack Obama's planned changes to drug policy are rightfully angry at how the president evolved his views.

With a second term assured, the feds have been quite cagey about how they'll

enforce federal law in states where marijuana is now legal.

Mike Riggs, an associate editor at Reason magazine,

evaluates the new landscape for drug enforcement. A lot of libertarians held out

quite a bit of hope for Barack Obama as somebody who was going to be, if not, for previous years the drug war of failure and when he named then Gil Kurlikowski the

former Seattle police chief as his drugs are people thought oh this is great and

then Gil kurekowski announces,

we're going to stop using the term war on drugs.

And everybody thought even, that's great too.

But what's happened since then?

What happened, what's happened since then is from day one, the crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, which

for the last, probably since, you know, the mid 90s, that's been our greatest measure of the federal government's hostility towards

illicit drug use as medical marijuana because it's the safest it's the most

regulated 96 has when California passed its medical marijuana laws.

And it has the low, as a drug, it has the lowest,

you know, it's not very addictive, it's not very harmful.

Anyway, so, you know, 2009, January 20th,

Obama was sworn in almost immediately DEA resumes

cracking down US attorneys resume opening cases prosecuting dispensary

...