Pubdate: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 Source: Daily Press (Newport News,VA) Copyright: 2005 The Daily Press Contact: http://www.dailypress.com Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/585 Author: Clarence Page Note: Page is a columnist with the Chicago Tribune Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Raich (Gonzales v. Raich) COURT BURNED MEDICAL POT "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." The same might be said of Supreme Court justices. Take, for example, Gonzales vs. Raich, the Supreme Court's medicinal marijuana case. The commerce clause in Article One of the Constitution could hardly be more clear in limiting federal power to commerce among the several states, not within a state. But in Gonzales vs. Raich, a 6-to-3 majority has stretched commerce to mean just what they choose it to mean - far enough to let the faraway feds, not the close-to-the-people state governments, decide whether their ailing residents should be allowed to grow their own medicine under a doctor's care. In the U.S. Senate's debate over judicial appointments, we constantly have heard conservatives argue that judges should lean toward a modest role for the government. Over the past decade, a conservative Supreme Court coalition under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has rolled back congressional power and elevated "states' rights" in a series of decisions. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court reasserted federal authority in Gonzales vs. Raich last week, even in the 11 states that now permit marijuana when recommended by a doctor. The people in those states have spoken and the Supreme Court has told them to shut up. Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion stretched the meaning of "commerce" to include anything done in one state that could have "a substantial effect on interstate commerce." And how does the court define "substantial"? Broadly enough to could cover just about anything. Justice Antonin Scalia, the archest of the high court's arch-conservatives, chimed in, if only to say that Stevens' federal intrusionism did not go far enough. "Drugs like marijuana are fungible commodities"; even when "grown at home and possessed for personal use," marijuana is "never more than an instant from the interstate market." Both opinions sound more like economic theory than day-to-day reality. After all, medical marijuana market is only a fraction of a state's overall drug traffic. How much impact can it have on the overall illegal multi-billion-dollar industry? That very rational point, among others, was made by Justice Clarence Thomas, who cut himself loose from his usual tether to Scalia's world views to raise a clear, compelling and badly needed voice of reason: If the two California women who are the defendants in this case are involved in "interstate commerce," he asked, what in these United States is not "interstate commerce?" In other words, keep your federal hands out of matters that pertain only to a particular state and do not infringe on fundamental human rights. That human rights point is particularly significant to African-Americans like Thomas and me. We happen to be old enough to remember when "states' rights" was offered as a lame excuse to perpetuate racial segregation laws in the South. The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision properly overruled "states' rights" that violate fundamental human rights. By contrast, Gonzales vs. Raich ironically overrules states' rights in order to violate a humane right, the right of the sick to treat their own illness. The good news in Gonzales vs. Raich is that the high court did not overturn any of the existing state medicinal marijuana laws. Stevens suggested that the executive branch might reclassify marijuana for medical purposes or that Congress might allow "the laboratory of the states" to decide this matter for themselves. In fact, Congress is currently considering two bills, backed mostly by Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans, that could legalize the medicinal use of marijuana at the federal level. Congress usually kicks such hot-burning issues as marijuana reform over to the courts. This time, the courts have kicked it right back. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake