This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 30th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Since the Department of Justice announced that the feds currently have no plans to overturn state laws legalizing marijuana.

The question has to be asked on what constitutional basis would they sue anyway.

Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the promising but bizarre announcement

from the DOJ.

If you read the headlines about this DOJ announcement, you get federal government

eases stance on marijuana.

U.S. allows states to legalize recreational marijuana with limits.

U.S. won't sue to block state marijuana legalization.

Yeah, it shows how strange the situation we're in right now.

And the good way to think about this is to ask the question of why do we need a constitutional

amendment to prohibit alcohol, but we don't have a constitutional amendment to prohibit drugs.

And because of certain decisions during the new deal is why the commerce power in particular

was expanded to the point that they said that they could reach individual drug users.

And that was incorrect. And now we have a situation where

it is simultaneously legal and illegal in Colorado and Washington to smoke

marijuana and that means that somewhere someone messed up and we know that it's not the states that

messed up saying that they have the power to legalize this or not that is a core

power of the state it's the federal government which expanded far beyond its

powers to into places where it never should have been involved. So now we have a

situation where the government is going to let the states will allow you to have jurisdiction

...