This is a Kato Daily Podcast from Monday, March 23rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Barack Obama's record as a drug warrior is mixed.

He's literally laughed off questions about marijuana legalization

while backtracking on his own promises of stepping down enforcement in some

areas but now well into his second term the president has been less of a disappointment.

So says Adam Bates, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

You take issue with a crack, really, that President Obama made about marijuana and its legalization and where that should

rank in millennial's policy priorities?

Yes, and President Obama has made this crack a couple times during his administration.

In 2009, he laughed off a question at a town hall meeting about marijuana legalization.

And then just last week he again suggested that

millennials should be more worried about important things like

climate change and war and peace and that issues like marijuana legalization should be at the very bottom of our priority list.

And I do, I did, as a member of the millennial generation I do take issue with that simply because

the marijuana legalization is one large aspect of an overall push to reform the ruinous war on drugs to resolve some of these horrible

side effects of drug prohibition generally in America and unlike things like war and

climate change I think these issues are issues that Americans have an opportunity

to really impact.

Right now today, we're seeing good pushes across America

to reform marijuana laws, to reform drug sentencing,

to reform civil asset forfeiture, in all of these abusive practices I think this is the

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