Recently, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has begun hinting at the fact that President Barack Obama would put an end to raids on marijuana dispensaries in California.

As candidate running for president of the United States, Obama said that states should be allowed to put forward their own rules concerning medical pot.

Wednesday, at a Washington news conference about Drug Enforcement Administration raids in California, which began last month when Obama took office, Holder announced that the nation’s administration had changed its policy regarding the raids.

Moreover, he stated that what Obama had said during the campaign would turn into law enforcement, while the promises he had made were already American policy.

Bill Piper, national affairs director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which is a marijuana advocacy group, said that Holder’s statement had been encouraging, adding that it meant that Obama was to come to treat marijuana as a health issue rather than a criminal justice issue.

Previously, in one of his appearances during the presidential campaign, Obama called forth his mother’s death, who lost the fight with cancer, and said that in his opinion, there was no difference between doctor-prescribed morphine and marijuana as methods to relieve pain.

Furthermore, back in March, the president told an interviewer that he found it to be entirely appropriate for a state to legalize marijuana for medical use, under the same regulations and controls as the other drugs prescribed by physicians.

On January 22, two days after Obama’s inauguration, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency raided a marijuana dispensary at South Lake Tahoe, while on February 2, it raided another four in the Los Angeles area.