Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling against medical marijuana and a scary proposed snitch law, America may finally be awakening from its decades-long stupor about recreational drugs.
Jun 7, 2005 | The battle over the war on drugs heated up several degrees on Monday when the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, ruled that state laws allowing the medicinal use of marijuana don't protect patients from federal prosecution for use of a controlled substance, despite a doctor's orders. The case, Gonzales vs. Raich, was originally filed by two California women who smoke pot for medical reasons.
Medical marijuana advocates were quick to point out that although the ruling was a disappointment, it came with a surprising acknowledgment by the justices that medical marijuana users had made "strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes."
"While we're disappointed, the validity of state medical marijuana laws was never at issue in this case," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, in a press statement. "The [state] medical marijuana laws ... will continue to protect patients from arrest by state and local authorities. Because [Drug Enforcement Agency] and other federal agents make only 1 percent of our nation's 750,000 marijuana arrests every year, patients in states with medical marijuana laws retain a high level of protection. Congress should act today to give those patients complete protection from arrest."
"In his opinion, Justice Stevens stressed the need for medical marijuana patients to use the democratic process, putting the ball in Congress' court," Kampia noted. "This is especially important now because next week, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on an amendment that would prevent the federal government from spending funds to interfere with state medical marijuana laws."
The good news is that Kampia and other leaders of the drug-war reform movement represent an increasingly informed and politically savvy group -- including several members of Congress -- who have spent the past several years trying to do something about America's draconian drug laws. As a result of the Supreme Court's decision on Monday, they are stepping up efforts to draw attention to the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, which will be considered this month as a part of an appropriations bill and, if passed, would prohibit the federal government from arresting, raiding or prosecuting patients who are abiding by state medical marijuana laws.
These reformers have also set their sights on another obviously needed legislative reform: repeal of the provision of the Higher Education Act that prohibits or delays the availability of financial aid to applicants with any drug-related misdemeanor or felony charge. The bill to repeal the provision (H.R. 1184), introduced by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., this session, already has 66 cosponsors in the House. To date, the Drug Reform Coordinator Network estimates, at least 165,000 would-be students have been denied financial aid since the amendment took effect in 2000. If passed, the bill would represent the first full repeal of a federal drug law since 1970.
To Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., denying students financial aid because they were busted for drug use or sales at some point in their lives looks more like a mental illness on a large scale than anything akin to an efficacious response to substance abuse. "The idea that we're going to prohibit people from using drugs is just a falsehood; it's just time that we stop what we're doing and try something else," McDermott, a nine-term veteran of Congress, told me at a Perry Fund event in Seattle last week.
As for the possibility of legalizing, regulating and even taxing certain illegal drugs, even the most forward-thinking of drug-war reformers have tended to stay away from discussing the idea in public, lest it seem too "radical."
But on June 2, the legalization movement gained an unlikely set of supporters -- specifically relating to marijuana, the most popular Schedule I drug. More than 500 leading economists, led by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, called for the Bush administration to engage in "an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition." Their move was in response to the release of a report on the budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, a visiting professor at Harvard University. According to Miron's research, the legal regulation of cannabis would conservatively save $7.7 billion in law enforcement and criminal justice costs, while revenues for the government could range from $2.4 to $6.2 billion, depending on the type of taxation system.
Another radical leap forward in drug-policy reform came in Washington state in January 2005, when the King County Bar Association passed a resolution supporting the statewide legalization and regulation of psychoactive substances. The move followed a three-year period of intensive research into the historical, social, racial, legal, economic and fiscal considerations surrounding the drug war -- both in Washington state and throughout the United States. The resulting 145-page report, "Effective Drug Control: Toward a New Legal Framework," was hailed by a wide spectrum of mainstream organizations, including the Church Council of Greater Seattle, King County Medical Society, Washington State Psychiatric Association, Washington Society of Addiction Medicine, and Washington Academy of Family Physicians. And as a result, Democratic state Sen. Adam Kline is pushing for legislation to examine the possibility of a new legal framework for regulating illicit substances.
Other state bar associations (including those in Vermont, Oregon, Maryland and Hawaii) are beginning their own studies of revamped approaches to the drug war, according to Roger Goodman, director of the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project. The reverberations of the report have been tremendous, says Goodman, although he admits that getting gung-ho prosecutors and law enforcement onboard remains the biggest hurdle.
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