This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 28th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

People are still wondering precisely how the feds will enforce or change drug laws in light of marijuana

legalization in Washington and Colorado.

Vanderbilt Law Professor Robert Mycos is author of On the Limits of Federal Supremacy

when states relax or abandon marijuana bans available at

Cato.org we spoke following a forum for the study held last month.

Discussions since the passage of marijuana initiatives in Colorado and Washington has turned to what the

federal government will do in response to these initiatives.

And it seems to me that the feds are really misrepresenting or at least a lot of law

enforcement officials are sort of misrepresenting what the Constitution actually says about the division of power between states and the federal government.

What are they saying and how should we be thinking of this concept known as federal supremacy?

Well, the typical view of federal state relations is very simplistic.

It says basically that if there is a conflict between state and federal law, the state law has to give way.

And that's by virtue of the supremacy clause of the Constitution.

So oftentimes you will see federal officials.

We've even seen some state officials who oppose what their states have done

invoke this concept of federal supremacy in the hopes

of blocking the implementation of state laws that differ from federal laws and the most prominent case we have today

really involves marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington

and the medical marijuana laws that preceded them in now 18 states.

But that principle, that simplistic principle, I think fails to capture

...