This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 11, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama continues waging the war on drugs despite the President's own pre-presidential assertions that the war

on drugs has been a failure.

John McQuarter agrees with that Obama.

McQuarter is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California Berkeley and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

This is his full speech given at a Cato Institute seminar in New York in October.

Thank you to the Kato Institute for having me today.

I am going to take an approach to this brief talk

that I don't usually take. I am going to read from a script, hopefully not in an off-putting way. I don't usually read, but I think that the message that I have to communicate today is so important and so timely that I want it to come out exactly the way one would put it if one were thinking very hard and alone and therefore that is writing.

So I'm going to begin right here.

Many of you are certainly weary of the

the glum circular conversation, as we're trained to call it, about race in America. I

suspect that you're tired of people telling you that you're a racist when you know that you aren't.

You're tired of one group of Americans, so often resisting thinking of themselves as individuals,

rather than as a group deserving of special consideration.

You sense a theatricality in the rituals of the issue

and the way it's discussed.

At least I do.

And I want all of this to end, and I think I know how it could.

Namely, the main obstacle to getting Black America past the illusion that racism is still a defining factor in America is the strained

relationship between young black men and police forces. The massive number of

...