HIGH COURT TWISTS POT RULING

If we had predicted that conservative judicial icons William Rehnquist
and Clarence Thomas would join Sandra Day O'Connor in championing the
rights of medical marijuana users, while liberals John Paul Stevens,
Ruth Ginsburg, David Souter and Steven Breyer would uphold "reefer
madness" anti-drug policies, our readers would have probably accused
us of smoking too much of the subject of this editorial.

Yet, it came to pass Monday as Stevens, writing for a 6-3 U.S. Supreme
Court majority, managed to find that a few ounces of marijuana grown
solely within a state that has legalized its use for medicinal
purposes and given to a patient licensed under state law to use the
drug constituted an impact on interstate commerce "substantial" enough
to justify disregarding the 10th Amendment, which says: "The powers
not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to
the people."

Admittedly, the high court had long stretched the commerce clause to
expand federal regulatory authority. But the tribunal had seemed to
edge back toward a traditional federalist position in its 1995 Lopez
decision striking down a 1990 federal law prohibiting guns in school
zones. In that ruling, Rehnquist, O'Connor and Thomas joined Antonin
Scalia and Anthony Kennedy in ruling the federal government had no
regulatory authority since the issue had no discernible impact on
interstate commerce.

Rehnquist, Thomas and O'Connor held fast to that principle Monday, but
Kennedy and Scalia defected to the liberal bloc in the 6-3 ruling
upholding federal authority over even strictly intrastate drug use.
Since we have a hard time imagining Stevens and Co. losing sleep over
medical marijuana, we assume they were fighting to uphold the broad
federal authority conferred by an elastic commerce clause. We find it
harder to understand why Scalia and Kennedy, generally advocates of
judicial restraint, defected from their Lopez case positions. Colorado
Attorney General John Suthers said the ruling would have little
practical impact locally. "The state doesn't care about people with
cards allowing them to grow 6 ounces or less," Suthers said. "We do
cooperate in state-federal investigations, where the feds target large
distribution networks. If federal authorities find medical marijuana
in the course of such an investigation, they are required by law to
destroy it.

"As attorney general, I will uphold [Colorado's] medical marijuana
law, but everyone who uses for medical purposes has to understand the
federal government is not bound by Colorado's constitutional
provisions. And if you have more than the 6 ounces allowed by state
law, you're at peril in state and federal law."

Suthers' position seems to be a common-sense response to conflicting
federal and state rules. We can't say the same about this latest
Supreme Court decision.