COURT BACKS U.S. MEDICAL MARIJUANA BAN

The Federal Government Can Prosecute Users In States With Laws Allowing
Its Use

WASHINGTON - People who smoke marijuana because their doctors
recommend it to ease pain can be prosecuted for violating federal drug
laws, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, overriding medical marijuana
statutes in 10 states.

The court's 6-3 decision was filled with sympathy for two seriously
ill California women who brought the case, but the majority agreed
that federal agents may arrest even sick people who use the drug as
well as the people who grow marijuana for them.

Justice John Paul Stevens, an 85-year-old cancer survivor, said the
court was not passing judgment on the potential medical benefits of
marijuana, and he noted "the troubling facts" in the case. However, he
said the Constitution allows federal regulation of homegrown marijuana
as interstate commerce.

The Bush administration has taken a hard stand against state medical
marijuana laws, but it was unclear how it would respond to the new
prosecutorial power. Justice Department spokesman John Nowacki would
not say whether prosecutors would pursue cases against individual users.

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the court's
"overreaching stifles an express choice by some states, concerned for
the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana
differently."

The women who brought the case, Gonzales vs. Raich , expressed
defiance.

"I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. I don't really have a
choice but to, because if I stop using cannabis, I would die," said
Angel Raich of Oakland, Calif., who suffers from ailments including
scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain. She says
she smokes marijuana every few hours.

Diane Monson, an accountant who lives near Oroville, Calif., has
degenerative spine disease and grows her own marijuana plants. "I'm
going to have to be prepared to be arrested," she said.

The ruling does not strike down California's Compassionate Use Act, or
similar ones in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada,
Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. Besides those states, Arizona
permits marijuana prescriptions but has never instituted a program to
support them. In Maryland, people accused of violating state
possession laws can present evidence to a judge of a medicinal use of
the drug; the judge could then lower the punishment to a $100 fine.

However, Monday's ruling may hurt efforts to pass laws in other states
because the federal government's prosecution authority trumps states'
wishes.

John Walters, director of national drug control policy, defended the
government's ban. "Science and research have not determined that
smoking marijuana is safe or effective," he said.

California's law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow,
smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's
recommendation. Monson and Raich contend that traditional medicines do
not provide the relief that marijuana does.

California has been the battleground state for medical marijuana. In
2001, the Supreme Court ruled in a California case that the federal
government could prosecute distributors despite their claim that the
activity was protected by medical necessity.

Two years later the justices rejected a Bush administration appeal
that sought power to punish doctors for recommending the drug to sick
patients. That case, too, was from California.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Monday that "people
shouldn't panic ... there aren't going to be many changes."

Local and state officers handle nearly all marijuana prosecutions and
must still follow any state laws that protect patients.

Monday's Supreme Court decision represented a victory for the court's
supporters of federal power over its proponents of states' rights.

In two cases in the past decade, the court limited Congress' power to
make laws in the name of regulating interstate commerce, saying that
it had begun to intrude upon local affairs. Backers of medical
marijuana had hoped to apply those precedents in this case.

But Stevens concluded the court was still bound by a 1942 Supreme
Court decision that defined interstate commerce broadly to include,
under certain circumstances, even subsistence wheat farming.

Stevens was joined by the court's three other consistent supporters of
federal power, Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen
Breyer. He also picked up the votes of two justices, Antonin Scalia
and Anthony Kennedy, who usually support states' rights.

Congress could be the next stop for the debate.

While there are other legal options for patients, Stevens wrote,
"perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the
democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these
(California women) may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

Still, even supporters say it is unlikely Congress would pass a law
allowing physicians to prescribe marijuana.

O'Connor was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights
advocates: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence
Thomas. While conservatives may not necessarily support medical
marijuana, they have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years.

O'Connor, who like Rehnquist has had cancer, said she would have
opposed California's medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a
legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making
it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own
home for one's own medicinal use."

Thomas said the ruling was so broad "the federal government may now
regulate quilting bees, clothes drives and potluck suppers throughout
the 50 states."

The case was hatched when Monson's backyard crop of six marijuana
plants was seized by federal agents in 2002. She and Raich sued then-
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting
them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home
raids or other intrusion by federal authorities.