This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 30th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has made good on his pledge to stop raiding medical marijuana facilities, at least those in full compliance with state laws.

Obama is not a federalist though, so what should we take it to mean that federal agents

appear to be stepping down deferring to state authority?

Aaron Houston is director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project

he visited the Cato Institute last week.

When Obama came into office in January of 2009 and appointed Eric Holder soon thereafter the White House

and the Department of Justice announced the new policy that the president was making good on his campaign pledge

to end these DEA raids, which were a senseless use of waste of government resources and not to mention an extremely heavy-handed enforcement

tactic for what are essentially administrative violations of state law in California.

So immediately after he announced that in March, after Eric Holder announced the new policy,

there was a raid by a conducted basically by the DEA

which was still headed by a Bush holdover, Michelle Leenhart, who still actually heads the DEA to this day, as the interim director

waiting for Obama to make an appointment.

And at this point, just a week ago, just several days ago, me the written guidelines were release which

memorialize and formalize this policy that was announced back in March which

was greeted with great cheer from our side, because it really is a nod to

state's rights to a certain extent of federalist tendency to give the deference to the state officials and the state laws.

So we're very pleased with it.

You mentioned federalism.

As I understand it, there's no mention of federalism by President Obama, by his officials.

If federalism is at all in play here, it is only as an afterthought for making what I think probably is a

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