Pubdate: Wed, 08 Jun 2005
Source: Gainesville Sun, The (FL)
Copyright: 2005 The Gainesville Sun
Contact:  http://www.sunone.com/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Raich (Gonzales v. Raich)

OPENING A NEW FRONT

So Much For The Great Federalist Revival

Forget about states rights and the limited reach of the federal
government. So long as it is done in pursuit of regulating interstate
commerce, Congress apparently has the constitutional authority to run
roughshod over states rights with impunity.

What's that you say? That cancer patients in California who grow small
quantities of marijuana to ease their own suffering have nothing to do
with interstate commerce?

That's not the way the U.S. Supreme Court sees it.

On a 6-3 majority, the court ruled Monday that the feds have the
authority to prosecute pot smoking cancer patients in California or
any of the other 10 states that have legalized the use of marijuana
for medical purposes.

"Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce
effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that
do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce," Justice
Antonin Scalia reasoned in a concurring opinion.

In plain English, what Scalia said was: No, medical marijuana users
don't impact interstate commerce. But invoking the interstate commerce
chestnut is the only constitutional lever we can think of to uphold
Washington's war on pot.

In the wake of the court's ruling, however, Washington has a pot
problem.

Angel Raich, the 39-year-old California woman named in the case, and
whose inoperable brain tumor and other health problems drove her to
use marijuana in the first place, isn't going to stop smoking it just
because the Supreme Court says she can be locked up for doing so.

"If I stop using cannabis, it would be the end of my life," she told
reporters following the decision. "I just simply cannot hold onto my
weight without cannabis."

So will the feds now throw Raich - and tens of thousands of other
patients just like her - into the slammer for failing to cease and
desist? And will they also lock up the physicians who write marijuana
prescriptions for the likes of Raich?

With our nation's prisons and jails already filled to overflowing with
non-violent drug offenders, must they now be converted into barred
hospital wards for cannabis-using terminal patients?

Won't a new war on medical marijuana users detract attention and
resources from the war on terrorism? And having badly misjudged the
public sentiment in the Terri Schiavo case, are Republicans in
Washington now eager to imprison grannies with glaucoma on grass?

We suspect not. This is an administration that can't even persuade the
U.S. supported government of Afghanistan to shut down its heroin trade

Already losing his battles to privatize Social Security and nip stem
cell research in the bud, President Bush isn't likely to open a new
front on the drug war by going after "offenders" who already are
wasting away from ravaging diseases.

The obvious solution, of course, is for Congress to pass a law
exempting states that legalize medical marijuana from federal
prosecution of anti-pot laws. But that isn't likely to happen, given
the "zero tolerance" politics of our time.

Florida isn't one of those states, and so for us the really bad news
in regard to Monday's decision is the court's once again falling back
on the interstate commerce clause as a threadbare justification to
stop states from doing whatever Washington disapproves of.

"If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, it can
regulate virtually anything, and the federal government is no longer
one of limited and enumerated powers," warned Justice Clarence Thomas
in a dissenting opinion.

Sounds like judicial activism to us.

If Angel Raich's remedy for her illness-induced weight loss truly
threatens the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, then
federalism really is dead. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake