Alan Bock: When Judicial Fantasies Take a Toll
Alan Bock, in the OCR (6-16-05):
[Mr. Bock is Sr. editorial writer at the Orange County Register and author of Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana.]
Despite its considerable impact on the rest of society, the judicial system often operates like a hermetically sealed environment, safely locked away from the dirt and grime we mere mortals experience. This can be especially true of the U.S. Supreme Court. When it takes a case, it decides only the issues before it in the briefs and decides them on the basis of the record created by lower courts. It places more reliance on words than professional writers do, so its insulation from reality can be hilarious or tragic.
Beyond the obvious irony - that people like Angel Raich face the likelihood of physical degeneration and even death if deprived of an herb people have used medicinally for millennia while judges in perhaps the most pampered environment in the country ponder whether to turn the feds loose on her - this insulation explains much about Justice John Paul Stevens's majority opinion in the medical marijuana case delivered Monday.
The issue was whether the Constitution's grant of authority to Congress to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States" reaches those who grow their own cannabis or have friends supply it free within the boundaries of a single state. Justice Stevens decided the Congress had such authority and exercised it properly when in 1970 it passed the Controlled Substances Act and placed marijuana on Schedule I, reserved for drugs with a high propensity for abuse, no accepted medical uses and no way to be used safely under medical supervision...
...But the words are there to buttress the cocoon, so Justice Stevens is satisfied. Prohibiting in-state cultivation by a patient is essential to the broad regulatory scheme Congress in its infinite wisdom created.
That may be the biggest fantasy of all. Who believes that the scheme created by the Controlled Substances Act has been effective at controlling or modestly reducing the use or flow of the drugs it specifies? Students consistently report that marijuana is easier to obtain than alcohol. Usage patterns rise and fall, but within a narrow range, and usually because of factors having little to do with enforcement.
The federales are to keep the power to arrest Angel Raich and Diane Monson and other sick people to maintain the integrity of a regulatory scheme that in the real world has been an abysmal failure.
Too bad the insulated fantasies of Supreme Court justices can do so much harm to sick people.