COURT'S MEDICAL MARIJUANA DECISION WAS A BUMMER

There are three big reasons to believe the Supreme Court made a big mistake
in its June 6 ruling that the laws in California and 10 other states
allowing medical use of marijuana are no protection against federal raids
and prosecutions.

First, morality: By what license, in a free and democratic society, do we
deny clearly effective medication to fellow citizens, suffering chronic,
horribly intense pain that's resistant to other treatments? Maybe that's
why, in a national poll released June 13, 68 percent of Americans opposed
(only 16 percent favored) arrest of medical marijuana users.

The legal crux of the Supreme Court's decision was the reach of Congress'
constitutional powers over interstate commerce. Did Justice Department
agents - enforcing the Controlled Substances Act that was created during
President Richard Nixon's "war on drugs" 35 years ago - overstep the federal
government's powers when they seized and destroyed home-grown cannabis
plants being used by two desperately ill Californians, Angel Raich and Diane
Monson?

Raich's and Monson's use of the drug is legal under California's
Compassionate Use Act, enacted by statewide initiative in 1996, which allows
marijuana use for patients who take it for medicinal purposes on
recommendation of a physician.

But because the tiny amounts of marijuana these women use could
theoretically seep into the multibillion-dollar national marijuana market -
and thus enter interstate commerce - Justice John Paul Stevens concluded for
the court that allowing them to do so against the will of the federal
government "would leave a gaping hole in the Controlled Substances Act."

It's worth noting our brilliant federal policy-makers have insisted on
keeping marijuana classified as a drug "with a high potential for abuse" and
"no currently accepted medical use." Yet the same federal law authorizes
physician prescriptions of morphine, a drug carrying serious risks of abuse
and addiction never attributed to marijuana.

Second, federalism: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissenting opinion hit the
salient point: There needs to be some limits to federal power "to maintain
the distribution of power fundamental to our federalist system of
government." The first paragraph of her dissent evoked Justice Louis
Brandeis' powerful words in a 1932 decision: "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."

Given the lack of innovation in today's federal government, its seeming
incapacity to think anew on critical issues ranging from energy to global
warming, health policy to growing economic disparities, we ought to be
celebrating Brandeis' admonition - not burying it.

Third, emotionalism: This is a highly emotional issue, both on the
medical-personal side and its relation to our contentious and utterly failed
war on drugs. Making medical marijuana a big, headline-grabbing national
dispute is just another diversion from the big issues Washington ought to be
addressing, like taming multitrillion-dollar deficits.

One can even make a parallel to Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973
decision legalizing abortion. Even before the decision, a number of states -
Colorado (acting in 1967), followed by California, Oregon, North Carolina,
New York, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington - had repealed or modified their
stiff penalties on abortion.

It's fair to ask: Without the jarring and unavoidably divisive Roe decision,
would the country have been able to adjust through a variety of state laws,
permissive or restrictive as their own cultures dictated? Is it possible the
issue wouldn't have taken on its emotional significance, giving rise to the
bitterly opposed national lobbying groups that we've seen?

Medical marijuana is a touch similar. Left to the states, we wouldn't need
another national clash of ideologies and array of competing interest groups.
Some states would struggle with the issue, others not. California could be
the lead theater - it loves the drama anyway - while others look on, then
move when the issue turns ripe for them.

Medical marijuana, notes my Citistates Group colleague Curtis Johnson, "just
shouldn't be worthy of Supreme attention. States are different. Let everyone
be free to live in a cultural environment of their choice. We don't need one
monolithic model. This is not Iran." Neal Peirce writes on regional, urban,
federal system and community development issues.