What Were Those Justices Smoking?
Monday's Supreme Court ruling against medical marijuana was widely expected, but that doesn't make it defensible from a legal or moral perspective.
Writing for the 6-3 majority in Gonzales vs. Raich, the 85-year-old liberal Justice John Paul Stevens solemnly counseled patients suffering chronic pain to turn to "the democratic process" for comfort. "The voices of voters," he mused, may "one day be heard in the halls of Congress" on behalf of legalizing medical marijuana.
His plea that those who need medical marijuana demand -- and wait for -- a change in federal law is weak medicine at best. The simple fact is that California voters, and voters in several other states, have already democratically raised their voices in support of allowing the use of marijuana in controlled situations for medical reasons.
While we consider whether the Republican-controlled Congress will pass a medical marijuana bill, we can listen to the howls of pain from people such as Angel Raich and Diane Monson, who brought the case to the Supreme Court.
They are Californians who suffer from a brain tumor and a degenerative spinal disease, respectively. Raich and Monson have testified that marijuana eases pain and helps them function in ways that other drugs do not. Most medical researchers find that plausible, as did 56% of California voters when they approved Proposition 215 legalizing medical marijuana in 1996.
In 2002, however, the Drug Enforcement Administration began to confiscate the drug from users because marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Raich and Monson sought an injunction against confiscation and other enforcement actions.
Now a Supreme Court majority has ruled that state laws allowing medical marijuana run afoul of the Constitution's "commerce clause," which gives the federal government supreme power to "regulate commerce
Yet, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted in her dissent, the government "has not overcome empirical doubt that the number of Californians engaged in personal cultivation, possession, and use of medical marijuana, or the amount of marijuana they produce, is enough to threaten the federal regime." As important, she wrote, it's not even clear that medical marijuana is commerce as we normally understand the term.
In a concurring dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argues flatly that "if Congress can regulate [medical marijuana] under the commerce clause, then it can regulate virtually anything -- and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."
