This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 2, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The growing centralization in the criminal law poses threats to your liberty in ways you probably can't see.

Harvey Silverglade, author of the new book Three Felonies a day, believes that criminal law

itself has become unmoored from our regular notions of culpability.

We spoke following a forum on criminalization at the Cato

Institute held yesterday. What would you tell those people who have not been personally

affected by this? That if they're active in their professions and if they become known to a substantial

number of people and they interact with a substantial number of people there's a

good chance in their lifetimes that they will have some question raised about

the legality of their activities by some agency of the federal government.

Why do you say that?

Because federal law is covering more and more areas of American life each year more activities are being deemed

controlled by or affected by federal legislation and as a result of that the combination of the

enormous growth the federal government and the areas controlled by federal

law and the increasingly vague federal criminal statutes and the vague

statutes and the vague interpretations of those statutes

simply makes it makes it statistically more likely that an adult today it's investigators at some point. Who is William Hurwitz?

A physician in a Virginia who has a long history of treating patients in a chronic and very debilitating pain.

It's a field, by the way, which is grossly under man,

that is there are very few doctors who are willing to treat patients with

chronic pain problems precisely because the medical profession has a different view of appropriate treatments

...