This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 25, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President is at once more ambitious and less ambitious when it comes to waging the war on drugs.

Stepping down on medical marijuana but

funding the rest of the drug war at higher levels than any other president.

Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy says Barack Obama lacks the moral authority to put people in federal

prison for things he did as a young man.

So earlier this month the Obama administration finally released its new national drug

control strategy and as it happened two days later the

Associated Press came out with a lengthy report on our 40-year drug war

using figures that had gotten from Freedom of Information Act requests.

And since 1970, according to the Associated Press report, since Richard Nixon declared drug abuse public enemy number one in the

United States. We've spent over a trillion dollars trying to improve Americans

character by preventing them from ingesting certain substances like marijuana.

Nearly half of that, 450 billion, we've spent locking up 37 million nonviolent offenders and 10 million of those for marijuana possession alone.

Now Barack Obama has gotten a lot of credit from liberal pundits because of his supposedly softer, more dovish approach to the

War on Drugs.

And there's something to that, but if you look at his national drug control budget, he's spending, as the AP report

notes, more than any president ever before on interdiction and enforcement, the war part of the drug war.

So you really have to ask yourself whether this is a new approach at all or

whether, as in other areas of the Obama administration's policy, the rhetorical differences are far

vaster than the actual substantive policy differences.

He's essentially stepped down on enforcing certain marijuana laws in

...