U.S. SUPREME COURT - POT AND POWER

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT'S DECISION on Monday upholding the federal ban
on medical marijuana was less about Angel Raich's pot than Roscoe
Filburn's wheat.

Ms. Raich is the California woman who tried to stop the federal
government from seizing the medical marijuana prescribed to ease the
pain of her brain tumor. But as sympathetic as one might be to Ms.
Raich, the U.S. Supreme Court got the law right when it upheld
Congress' power to regulate marijuana based on a New Deal
interpretation of Congress' broad power to regulate interstate
commerce. That's where Roscoe Filburn's wheat figures in.

The Supreme Court based its medical marijuana decision on a precedent
giving Congress the power to regulate the marketing of wheat that Mr.
Filburn grew on 12 acres of his Ohio farm for his own consumption. The
court majority said that Congress could regulate Ms. Raich's pot,
which never crossed state lines or was sold in commerce, for the same
reason it could regulate Mr. Filburn's wheat, which also never crossed
state lines or was sold. In each case, the regulations were
permissible because they were part of a broader regulatory scheme
affecting commerce.

The decision sharply limits the states'-rights approach to
congressional power that began a decade ago and has been Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist's legacy. Monday's dissenters - the chief justice
and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas - complained that
the decision threatened their efforts to breathe new life into
federalism. So what might appear at first blush as a conservative
victory for a hard-line crackdown on marijuana actually is a signal
victory for more moderate justices who favor giving Congress the broad
commerce powers it used to pass civil rights and fair labor laws.

A decade ago, the Rehnquist court threw out the Gun-Free School Zones
Act and then the Violence Against Women Act on the grounds that
Congress had not shown their connection to interstate commerce. But
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court on Monday, said that
the Gun-Free Schools and Violence Against Women decisions had been
read "far too broadly" and had to be interpreted in light of the
"modern-era."

The dissenters bemoaned the decision's damage to the idea that states
can serve as laboratories of experimentation as California and at
least eight other states had in legalizing medical marijuana.

Justice Stevens pointed out that supporters of medical marijuana can
lobby Congress to change the law. That unlikely prospect is cold
comfort to Angel Raich.