This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 17, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

At the Cato Institute's Conference on Poverty held in New York. Columbia University Professor

John McQuarter discussed some policy reforms that could reduce poverty in America

a primary problem he says is America's decades long failed war on drugs.

The first thing that I think will make a major dent in black poverty is to eliminate the war on drugs and that's not just

because that is a particularly favorite subject of mine, it's because it really does apply directly to this problem.

So never mind that the war on drugs is a failure.

I mean, that's an ineluctable fact.

From 2006 to 2010 heroin overdoses went up 45%

amidst a war on drugs that during that time had been going on for over 40 years

hopeless. So first of all it doesn't work. Second... going on

for over 40 years, hopeless. So first of all, it doesn't work.

Second, never mind that the war on drugs is what creates the sort of thing that leads to

episodes such as what happened in Ferguson.

As I argued in Time a few months ago,

if we look at the entire trajectory

of what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. The key point is

what led Michael Brown to have the oppositional attitude towards Wilson that he had.

And wait, as I said in Time magazine,

that attitude was justified.

He was justified in his dismissal of Wilson and what he clearly felt initially as an inappropriateness

in that man's authority.

...