This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 30, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Many states have moved toward approving medical marijuana.

Now President Obama's pledge to stop raiding medical marijuana

facilities in California and other states has earned him plenty of praise from

opponents of the drug war to the larger trend on marijuana,

medical, and otherwise it is moving toward decriminalization.

Rob Campia is head of the Marijuana Policy Project, we spoke following a forum on Medical Marijuana March 17th.

Does Medical Marijuana as a policy issue?

Is that meant in some way to change attitudes about marijuana in other ways?

The answer is no. That's a short answer, but so yeah there are kind of

two different ways of looking at it at least at least two different ways. One is

prohibitionists say that medical marijuana is a stepping stone to

legalization of marijuana. It's a smoke screen for legalization. And therefore we

shouldn't have it. There are people on my side of the issue who are afraid that if we legalize medical marijuana, that some of the best arguments for

legalizing marijuana will be taken away. The best spokespeople will be protected

and then it will be harder to end marijuana prohibition for the non-patients.

And then there are folks in my camp, which is to say that we believe that people

who use marijuana, whether it's for recreational use, medicinal use, spiritual use, that those people should not be arrested

and put in jail.

Now our society is not quite ready yet to completely end marijuana prohibition. So what we want to do is keep as many

people from being arrested and put in jail as possible in the short run. One way of doing that

is to legalize medical marijuana state by state. Every time we

...