June 6, 2005
Gone to pot
Expected, but insane:
WASHINGTON - Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors’ orders, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state medical marijuana laws don’t protect users from a federal ban on the drug.
The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug’s use to treat various illnesses.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.
Ashcroft v. Raich centered on two California residents who used marijuana for medical purposes. Under the Constitution, Congress can pass laws regulating a state’s economic activity if it involves interstate commerce. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines. But the Court felt that even this limited use was a threat, as Stevens wrote for the majority (you can read the decision and dissents here):
…[R]espondents are cultivating, for home consumption, a fungible commodity for which there is an established, albeit illegal, interstate market.
…California is only one of at least nine States to have authorized the medical use of marijuana, a fact JUSTICE O’CONNOR’s dissent conveniently disregards in arguing that the demonstrated effect on [interstate] commerce while admittedly “plausible” is ultimately “unsubstantiated,” post, at 14, 16. Congress could have rationally concluded that the aggregate impact on the national market of all the transactions exempted from federal supervision is unquestionably substantial.
The Supreme Court’s leap of logic here is breathtaking—that marijuana legally grown or locally supplied to ease the pain of a small number of people suffering from cancer, AIDS and other serious illnesses can somehow have a “substantial” impact on interstate commerce in the drug. This absurd conclusion will not only cause a lot of suffering—it will criminalize the seriously ill and drive medicinal marijuana use even further underground.
In her principal dissent (which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has it right: the court is overreaching to make it “a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use.”
As I wrote just last week, this is yet another step in the wrong direction in a nonsensical and ineffective drug war that, for marijuana alone, costs the U.S. up to $14 billion dollars a year, incarcerates thousands of innocent people—and has absolutely no effect on usage. It’s time for a new approach.
Posted by Stephen at 12:47 PM in Drugs | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
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The Supreme Court handed down the decision that federal law enforcement can prosecute marijuana users in spite of state laws.
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Tracked on June 6, 2005 2:00 PM
