Pubdate: Thu, 16 Jun 2005
Source: Los Angeles City Beat (CA)
Copyright: 2005 Southland Publishing
Contact:  http://www.lacitybeat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2972
Cited: Gonzales v. Raich http://www.angeljustice.org
Cited: The report, "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition" 
http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/mironreport.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Raich (Gonzales v. Raich)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)

HIGH AND MIGHTY

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against medical marijuana patients
recently in Gonzales v. Raich, the real dynamics of the pot debate
were revealed. Political (as opposed to social) conservatives and
libertarians are growing increasingly disturbed about the legal
underpinnings of the Drug War, and liberals are waffling badly,
struggling to maintain New Deal powers while practically begging
Congress to take those powers away from them, at least when it comes
to marijuana.

And Congress is moving in that direction.

One would expect that, in the wake of such a ruling, anti-drug forces
in Congress and in state legislatures would feel empowered to go after
pot in a big way, but just the opposite occurred.

On Tuesday, an amendment to defund the Justice Department's
prosecution of medical marijuana patients in states where it is legal
failed in a House vote, but gained 13 votes over last year. The
bipartisan amendment, introduced by U.S. Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), failed 161-264, but gained in strength.

Similarly, Raich seems to have had little effect on state
legislatures. On Tuesday, June 7, the day after the Supreme Court
announcement, Rhode Island's Senate passed a bill that would legalize
medical marijuana, 34-2. Fifty of the 75 members in Rhode Island's
House are co-sponsors of a similar bill.

Perhaps, in the end, right-wing arguments to legalize pot, especially
medical pot, will rule the day. The three Supreme Court dissenters on
Raich -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas
and Sandra Day O'Connor -- ruled that Congress was "overreaching" in
regulating marijuana grown at home, by prescription-wielding patients
in a state where such prescriptions were legalized by an overwhelming
vote of the people.

Meanwhile, the best liberal Justice John Paul Stevens could say,
writing for the majority, is that sick people didn't deserve to be
treated like this, and perhaps one day "their voices   would be
heard in the halls of Congress."

Just days before the Raich decision, Nobel Prize-winning economist
Milton Friedman, one of the architects of Reaganomics, touted a new
report more certain to resonate with Congress than any medical
analysis of pot. The June 2 report, "The Budgetary Implications of
Marijuana Prohibition," spearheaded by Harvard economist Dr. Jeffrey
Miron, laid out that regulating and taxing pot would produce combined
national savings and revenues of $10 to $14 billion.

More than 500 other leading economists endorsed this report in an open
letter to The New York Times. The clamor from the right is getting
increasingly hard to ignore. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake