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Article published Dec 2, 2004
Supreme Court should side with states on marijuana laws

The people of California and nine other states have decided that they want their citizens to be able to use marijuana when a doctor prescribes it as medically necessary. The federal government disagrees.So now the question is before the Supreme Court: Who gets to decide? Do the people of these states have the right to make their own laws? Or should these laws be dictated to them by Washington?The court should side with the states. The issue is not whether marijuana is medically necessary or whether the social benefits outweigh the ills of allowing medicinal use of the drug. The issue is whether the federal government has the power to dictate these matters and to overrule the decisions of the people of these states.The court should declare that it does not.The Constitution gives the federal government certain powers. For the most part, those powers should be limited to those things the states cannot do for themselves. That includes national defense and regulating interstate commerce. It does not include overseeing the school systems of the states or overriding their laws.Federal officials claim that they have a right to cast aside the state medical marijuana laws because they impact the government's ability to regulate the commercial medicine trade. Nonsense.The medical marijuana laws have remarkably little interstate effect. People go to doctors within their own state, are authorized to use marijuana to relieve their medical condition and then grow their own or obtain marijuana from someone else within their state.If this practice is approved within that state, the federal government should have nothing to say about it. Unless this procedure caused some interstate problem, federal officials should steer clear.Officials in Washington like to think of themselves as the supervisors of the states. They are not. There should be clear distinctions between state and federal authority. And federal rules should not always supercede state law.The court has shown good sense and clear reasoning on such matters in recent years. It has controlled the attempts ofCongress to dictate state law on such matters as criminal law and gun possession. It has upheld the authority of the states to make their own laws. The court has been restoring a sense of constitutional federalism that had become lost. The justices should continue to do so by upholding these state laws.