MEDICAL MARIJUANA: RULING: FEDS TRUMP STATES

Supreme Court Lets Users Face Arrest

Washington --- The Supreme Court's elderly members have dealt with
cancer, chronic back pain and other ailments. They've also lost
spouses, children and friends to illness.

Against that backdrop the justices voted on Monday, with some apparent
reservations, to let federal agents arrest people who use pot to ease
their pain, even in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

The court's 6-3 decision was infused with sympathy for two seriously
ill California women who brought the case.

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,
Stevens said, the Constitution allows federal regulation of homegrown
marijuana.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose recent bout of thyroid cancer
has stirred speculation he will step down soon, opposed the decision.
The 80-year-old has chronic back pain, and his wife died in 1991 of
ovarian cancer.

He signed a dissent, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that said
the court decision wrongly "extinguishes" state trials for medical
marijuana.

The women who brought the case 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.

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

States' Laws Intact

The ruling does not strike down California's law, or similar state
laws in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon,
Vermont and Washington. However, it 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
federal government's ban. "Science and research have not determined
that smoking marijuana is safe or effective," he said.

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

In her dissent, O'Connor, who like Rehnquist has had cancer, 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."

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

"I think it would look bad if the federal government focused its
prosecution authority on a sick person," said Daniel Abrahamson, with
the Drug Policy Alliance.

Left Up to Congress

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."
Stevens' only son died of cancer.

Even supporters of medical marijuana use 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: Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. O'Connor 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.

They claimed protection under the Constitution, which says Congress
may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it
involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders.