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. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake