Don't bogart that joint

Did you ever think you would be cheering on Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi? Neither did I. But they are among the states filing amicus curiae briefs in a case before the Supreme Court about medical marijuana.

Washington (AP, November 29) - Attorneys for the Bush administration and two California women sparred Monday before the Supreme Court over the use of marijuana as a legitimate medical treatment.

Justices are considering whether sick people in 11 states with medical marijuana laws can get around a federal ban on pot. ...

Besides California, nine other states allow people to use marijuana if their doctors agree: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Arizona also has a law permitting marijuana prescriptions, but no active program. ...

Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, conservative states that do not have medical marijuana laws, sided with the marijuana users on grounds that the federal government was trying to butt into state business of providing "for the health, safety, welfare and morals of their citizens."

Now, the argument should give us pause because it's really a states' rights claim, which as we well know can be (and has been) used for various nefarious purposes, but it is still true that there are yet some things traditionally regarded as within the realm of state control and I think there is a very serious question of the feds' authority to punish someone who grows their own pot for their own use, who neither sells it nor transports it across state lines, and who has permission under their own state's laws to do what they're doing.

In fact, Bloomberg News notes that

[t]he court ruled in 1995 that Congress couldn't make it a federal crime to possess a gun in a school zone, and in 2000 the justices struck down a provision that let rape victims sue their attackers in federal court.

In those cases the court said Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce didn't cover local, non-economic acts.

So now we'll see if what's good enough for gun owners and rapists is good enough for seriously sick people.

Interestingly, the government attorney in the case, Paul Clement, doesn't seem to have spent a lot of time arguing the feds jurisdictional powers. He just kept on about "marijuana BAD." About the closest he came, based on news reports, was his argument that California, from where the case at hand arose, may be allowing people to subject themselves to health dangers from doing the evil weed. (Which could be an argument for federal action on the grounds that states were failing to protect "the health, safety, welfare and morals of their citizens," which if I understand correctly was a legal basis for the validity of federal civil rights laws that did not involve interstate commerce: the feds could step in if the states failed their duties.)

But for the most part, Clement harped on supposed dangers, assumed and unproved social harms, and the supposed uselessness of medical marijuana.

"Smoked marijuana really doesn't have any future in medicine," he said. ...

The Bush administration argues that Congress has found no accepted medical use of marijuana and needs to be able to eradicate drug trafficking and its social harms.

Now, first of all, I'm not sure where we get the idea that Congress and/or Paul Clement are the final arbiters of what is medically useful. Second, since we're not talking about trafficking here, there's no need even to argue that because it's utterly irrelevant. But something else about Clement's statement struck me: Smoked marijuana has no future in medicine, he said. Not marijuana, smoked marijuana. So does this mean that if some huge pharmaceutical company patented the active ingredients, formed them into a pill available by prescription at the usual insanely large markup, that would be okay? Certainly, his statement leaves that option open, doesn't it?

Footnote: Apparently, the usual suspects are braying about "sending the wrong message" and

several justices repeatedly referred to America's drug addiction problems.

Did anybody involved have the gumption to say to those justices "And just what does addiction have to do with marijuana?" And what is this "wrong message" we'd be sending? "Hey, you, too, can grow your own dope and smoke it, too! All you have to do is be dying from cancer or AIDS, in constant pain from brain tumors, or going blind from glaucoma! A snap!"

Yeah, I bet that'll send the rates of the use of heroin and barbituates and other actually addictive drugs skyrocketing.

Extra added footnote: For more information on both medical marijuana and why marijuana use shouldn't be treated as a criminal matter at all, check out The Science of Medical Marijuana and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).