United Press International - October 27, 2003
Peter Roff and Jillian Jonas, UPI National Political Analysts

Medical marijuana advocates hail the ruling, which they say affirms the constitutionality of laws already on the books in nine states. Opponents say the court's refusal to hear the case continues a pattern of deception in which the federal government pays lip service to medical marijuana without taking on the political costs of changing the law.

Question: Should the federal government allow the states to govern all aspects of the medical marijuana question, including access and eligibility? UPI National Political Analysts Peter Roff and Jillian Jonas face off on opposite sides of this question.

-- Jonas: What exactly have they been smoking?

Does the federal government have the right to interfere in a physician's course of treatment with a patient? The courts -- including the highest court in the land -- feel that right, in fact, does not exist.

Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU's Drug Policy Litigation Project, said, "What's at issue is the ability of doctors to speak openly and honestly with their patients about marijuana as a viable therapy option."

"I can do my job again and have real conversations with my patients about medical marijuana as part of their treatment options," proclaimed Dr. Marcus Conant, who filed the case along with the ACLU.

It's important to remember that the laws passed by the assorted states, including California, Arizona, Colorado and Maine, allow doctors to prescribe pot as medicinal therapy but not to provide it.

The legal issues regarding how doctors practice medicine is only one facet of the tale; there is also the political backdrop to this story that is making it particularly compelling.

It has been utterly fascinating to witness how many conservative Republicans who have been hiding behind the 10th Amendment and the states-rights cloak for years as an excuse to limit individual, environmental, disability and civil rights law are now scrambling to support the evil entity known most commonly to you and I as the federal government.

These are the same people who established their own conservative legal network -- a litmus test for many Bush judicial nominees like Miguel Estrada -- called the Federalist Society, specifically to promote state self-determination and especially to overturn settled law with which they disagree.

The farce has been terribly entertaining -- watching these ideologues screaming about how the federal government must be involved in areas already understood to be within the states' domain, like the practices of medicine, or in the face of undesirable issues (to them), like single-sex marriage and assisted suicide.

It's not simply those left of center on the political spectrum recognizing this political fraud.

Many libertarians -- hardly friends of liberals -- also recognize the truth, "The medical marijuana referenda movement is a small part of that larger effort, but it brings to the fore the hypocrisy of those who invoke federalism selectively for their own political purposes," Roger Pilon, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, testified before Congress.

For the most part, libertarians believe in very small government, across both financial and social lines. Little government intervention on issues like the economy, trade and regulation, but also little intervention on matters of personal choice, like medical marijuana.

The Supreme Court ruling has the potential to affect changes across the board on issues that make many Republicans uncomfortable, like the late-term abortion bill about to be signed into law by the president. Of course they have to fight, consistency be damned.

Whether it's a pipe dream, altered senses or just wishful thinking, they are deluding themselves if they think we cannot see their hypocrisy.

-- Roff: Their job is to enforce the law.

Without going too deeply into the specifics of the cases involved, it is more than likely the Supreme Court is waiting for a case that allows them to address the medical marijuana issue in more detail; hence its refusal to hear arguments at this time.

Federal and state laws hold the sale, possession and usage of marijuana is unlawful and punishable. Some seek to get around those laws through the dubious claim that so-called medical marijuana has certain therapeutic proprieties useful in combating the after effects of chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis and other illnesses.

The "Oh, but it's helpful" argument tugs at heartstrings but ignores the obvious.Marijuana is a very complex, unstable drug that today is much more potent then the joints our parents don't remember "bogarting" at Woodstock.

Marijuana forces more teens into drug treatment programs than all other illegal drugs combined, adversely effects most if not all of the body's essential systems and contains, according to some estimates, 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing hydrocarbons than tobacco.

It is illegal, as America's Challenge President Joyce Nalepka says, "because it is harmful," not the other way around. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency continues listing it on Schedule 1 -- the drugs it considered most dangerous.

The medical marijuana movement stands atop a slippery slope that ends with the end of all anti-marijuana prohibitions. The campaign seeks to create enough loopholes to render the existing laws meaningless, much as the abortion rights movement argues, incorrectly in my view, that a law to punish doctors who perform partial-birth abortions is really a backdoor challenge to Roe vs. Wade.

Washington has long held the authority to protect the safety of the American people while the progressive era reforms of Republican Theodore Roosevelt plunged the federal government into the regulation of food, drugs, the workplace, corporate practices and many other aspects of life in America.

The idea of limited government and respect for states rights does not mandate an absolute prohibition on federal interference into the affairs of the 50 states.

The regulatory Nazis who cheer the government's intervention cheerfully turn the argument on its head where matters of sex and drugs are concerned.

Conservatives who argue against state medical marijuana laws or, for that matter, state right-to-die laws or other aspects of social and cultural policy are not per se violating the federalist principle inherent in the 10th Amendment; they are recognizing that the federal government has a constitutional responsibility to protects human life, liberty and property.

In some cases, its intrusion is warranted.

In many cases, however, the federal government has no business involving itself in a particular state matter. The difference most often appears to be who is intruding.

Over the years it is Congress, not the federal courts, that has been most aggressive in the violation of state sovereignty. The federal courts are, more often than not, willing participants in the crime, but only after the fact.

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