COURT OKs MARIJUANA PROSECUTIONS FOR SICK

WASHINGTON - Siding with federal authority over states' rights and
compassion for terminally ill patients, the Supreme Court said Monday that
the government can prosecute sick people who smoke pot as a painkiller -
even in states where such use is legal.

The 6-3 ruling, which crossed the court's usual ideological lines, doesn't
invalidate laws in the 10 states that have approved medical marijuana, but
it does deflate their power to protect users and doctors who prescribe the
drug.

The court said the regulation of illicit drugs is a matter of interstate
commerce, reserved exclusively to the federal government by the
Constitution. That includes regulating local activities, such as the
growing and consumption of medical marijuana, that could have an effect on
interstate markets. So the federal Controlled Substance Act of 1970, which
classifies marijuana as a drug unacceptable for any use, holds sway over
any state provisions that say otherwise.

The decision means patients such as Diane Monson and Angel Raich, the
California women who challenged the federal law, risk federal prosecution
if they don't stop growing and smoking marijuana.

Raich said Monday that her decision was a no-brainer.

"If I stop using it, I would die," said Raich, who admitted she was smoking
even as she talked with reporters by phone about the ruling. She suffers
from an inoperable brain tumor, scoliosis and several other permanent
disabilities, and other medications have been ineffective. "I do not have a
choice but to continue using cannabis," Raich said.

Raich and her lawyers said their next move is to Congress, where they hope
to persuade lawmakers to restrain the Justice Department from spending
money to prosecute medical marijuana users in states that permit it.
They'll also go back to court to fully litigate a claim, undecided by the
high court, that they have a constitutional right to disregard the federal
drug law out of medical necessity.

The Justice Department didn't say Monday how aggressive it would be in
pursuing prosecutions against medical marijuana users.

In his opinion for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens sympathized with
Raich and others who use marijuana, saying the case was complicated by
their claims that they would "suffer irreparable harm" if the court ruled
against them.

But the question the court faced, Stevens said, was whether Congress' power
to regulate interstate markets could reach into areas such as medicinal
marijuana, where drugs are produced and consumed locally.

"Well-settled law controls our answer," Stevens wrote. The Controlled
Substances Act "is a valid exercise of federal power, even as applied to
the troubling facts of this case." Stevens' opinion was joined by Justices
Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
Stephen Breyer.

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court had
opened the door to nearly unlimited government regulation.

"Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or
sold, that has never crossed state lines and that has had no demonstrable
effect on the national market for marijuana," Thomas wrote. "If Commerce
can regulate this . . . then it can regulate virtually anything."

Chief Justice William Rehnquist also dissented, as did Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor, who wrote separately.

Key to the court's decision was a determination that there's no such thing
as personally grown or consumed marijuana that doesn't have an effect on
the broader drug market. Monson and Raich had maintained that their drugs
existed in a parallel market that had no effect on the illicit drug trade,
since they're not buying or selling marijuana.

But Stevens found the effect of their activity on interstate markets
"readily apparent," given that the California law only loosely restricted
the amount of marijuana patients could grow.

"The likelihood that all such production . . . will precisely match the
patients' medical needs . . . seems remote," he said, "whereas the danger
that excesses will satisfy some of the admittedly enormous demand for
recreational use seems obvious."

O'Connor took issue with that logic.

"The court's definition of economic activity . . . threatens to sweep all
of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach," she wrote. "To
draw the line wherever private activity affects the demand for market goods
is to draw no line at all. We have already rejected the result that would
follow - a federal police power."

The case has its roots in a federal raid on Monson's Oroville, Calif., farm
in 2002. She was growing marijuana and smoking it to ease her back pain.

The raid was tied to a federal crackdown in the war on terror; President
Bush has said the illegal drug trade helps finance terrorists.

But the raid also brought federal power into conflict with a 1996
California law that permits doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients, who
are allowed to grow the herb. It inspired Monson and Raich to sue, saying
the federal government couldn't enforce its ban on marijuana in a state
that had legalized its medicinal use.

Nine other states - Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada,
Oregon, Vermont and Washington - have similar laws.