LET STATES DECIDE

Medicinal Marijuana Ruling Invites Congress to Change Law

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday ruled 6-3 that sick people who use small
amounts of physician-prescribed marijuana to alleviate pain and nausea
are subject to federal prosecution. A day later, not much seemed to
have changed.

Attorneys general in some of the 10 states that allow marijuana for
limited medical purposes issued statements that the ruling would not
result in a crackdown on users. U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
has not indicated whether he will continue the hard-line policy on
marijuana use of his predecessor, John Ashcroft.

At least one Justice Department official went out of his way to
reassure patients that they had little to fear from federal agents.

"We have never targeted the sick and the dying, but rather criminals
engaged in drug trafficking," Drug Enforcement Administration
spokesman Bill Grant said. That doesn't explain why the DEA
participated in a California drug raid four years ago against an
accountant with degenerative spinal disease who had grown a few pot
plants in her garden for personal use.

That California case led to this week's Supreme Court ruling that
scrambled the court's ideological lineup. While liberal Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg voted with the majority, finding that the federal
government has the power to regulate the growth and use of pot,
conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist joined Justices Sandra
Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas in the dissenting opinion.

Thomas commented that if Congress could regulate a product that was
never bought or sold or taken across state lines, it could regulate
anything. In the dissent, Justice O'Connor defended the right "that a
single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a
laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk
to the rest of the country."

Even the majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens seemed
almost apologetic. It conceded the therapeutic value of marijuana and
the possibility that the medical needs of a suffering patient might
outweigh the government's interest in outlawing its use by the general
population, though that was not an issue in the ruling. In the opinion
Stevens actually encouraged advocates of medicinal marijuana to lobby
Congress to change the law to allow an exemption.

Unfortunately, few lawmakers are willing to vote for a bill that has
been characterized by opponents as undermining the war on drugs. The
Medical Marijuana Act, sponsored by U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass.,
and Ron Paul, R-Surfside, has been filed each session for the last 10
years, and never gets out of committee.

As Paul told the Associated Press, "I think support is strong, but
people are still frightened a little bit by the politics of it." He
also observed that if Congress held a secret vote, 80 percent of his
colleagues would back the law. Through a spokesman, Paul indicated his
objection to the Supreme Court ruling had more to do with the
violation of states' right to regulate their internal affairs and less
to do with the value of marijuana as a medical therapy.

The court majority was wrong to assert federal primacy over a health
care matter that is properly within the purview of state government,
but it did get one thing right. Congress is the forum where advocates
of medicinal marijuana should now press their case to allow suffering
people access to a nonaddictive pain reliever they can grow in their
own back yard.