cannabisnews.com: Sanity's AWOL in War on Drugs





Sanity's AWOL in War on Drugs
Posted by CN Staff on December 04, 2004 at 08:11:28 PT
By Sidney Zion
Source: News-Sentinel
The latest battle in the great War on Drugs showed up in the Supreme Court on Monday, with the feds arguing that if sick or dying people are allowed to use homegrown marijuana for their pain, the price on the streets will go down.In the logic of the war department, this would have a terrible impact on interstate commerce, where, presumably, Congress has an interest in promoting the sale of marijuana.
If this strikes you as crazy, it's because you don't understand the law, the necessary reach of a government that is grounded on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. We are talking now of the stuff of lawyers and judges, who, when it comes to drugs, display no immunity from going AWOL from reality.First, the facts of the two cases out of California that the top court heard this week. One involved a woman with inoperable brain cancer, the other a woman whose severe back spasms require marijuana.By referendum, California voters passed a law permitting the use of marijuana under a doctor's order to relieve a variety of medical ailments. Nine other states followed suit.The federal drug enforcers answered by busting both women. The U.S. Court of Appeals in California ruled for them on the grounds their conduct did not fall within Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce because this had nothing to do with any kind of commerce, much less interstate.You might think the government would let cases like this pass or at least show benign neglect. We're not talking about legalization of narcotics here, just medicalization, just humanity.But the War on Drugs has no interest in such sentimentality. This war is 90 years old with nothing to show but failure, combined with rampant corruption.It doesn't matter. The more we lose, the more we spend. In the Supreme Court arguments, the government estimated that the marijuana market alone accounts for $10.5 billion a year - then asked the court to knock out California's law in the name of helping the war succeed!The argument that homegrown pot had an impact on interstate commerce rests on a 1942 Supreme Court decision that allowed the feds to punish a wheat grower for withholding his home consumption from the Agriculture Department's regulations. The reason: If he hadn't used it for his family, he'd have bought it in the marketplace, thus raising the price of wheat, which Congress wanted.Justice Anthony Scalia said he had always thought that case was a joke, but now he opined that it was the law. Scalia, who votes for states' rights except when he doesn't - see Gore v. Bush - said that the old wheat ruling looked right to him now.Students of Scalia, the sharpest man on the court, might have thought he could separate the wheat from the weed. But the politics of drugs has a way with the finest of minds, and according to reporters covering the court, the majority is going to overturn the California law.I asked Yale Kamisar, the legendary law professor at Michigan Law School, what he thought about this apparent reliance by the court on the ancient wheat decision."I look at it this way," he said. "If they're right, the Congress can ban breast-feeding because it has an economic impact on the interstate sale of milk."Sidney Zion is a columnist for the New York Daily News.Source: News-Sentinel, The (Fort Wayne, IN)Author: Sidney ZionPublished: December 4, 2004Copyright: 2004 The News-SentinelWebsite: http://www.fortwayne.com/Contact: nsletters news-sentinel.comRelated Articles & Web Site:Angel Raich v. Ashcroft Newshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/raich.htmMarijuana Use Isn't Commercehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19971.shtmlHealth Issue Goes To Pothttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19966.shtml
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Comment #6 posted by 13th step on December 04, 2004 at 19:48:43 PT
Just a note
about Schlosser, if anyone here hasn't read Reefer Madness, or Fast Food Nation, do yourself a favor, and go buy them!Or, do what I did, and request it at your local library. I requested both, and within two months, voila! Both are on the shelves, and they have been checked out so much that now they have the audio books!
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Comment #5 posted by dr slider on December 04, 2004 at 13:46:15 PT:
the veil
Note as well that one of the exemptions in the Constitution for involuntary servitude (slavery) is in case of convicted criminals. The wider the definition of crimes, the larger the obvious slaveholdings, thus solidifying your illusion of freedom.
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Comment #4 posted by websurfer2 on December 04, 2004 at 11:38:24 PT:
Eric Schlosser has a perceptive viewpoint on this
Author denounces U.S. policies on drugs, prisonsBy Samara Kalk Derby
December 4, 2004'This isn't a war on drugs. This is a war on certain people who use certain drugs. I wonder if anyone's going to go to prison for life for Vioxx?'Prisons are 'our form of low-income housing. It's just about the only low-income housing we've built for 20 years.'As the Union Theater began to fill up before Eric Schlosser's lecture Monday night, a line for non-ticket holders stretched around the theater, up the stairs and down the hall."Is he that famous?" one young woman asked a friend as she passed the line.Schlosser, author of best sellers "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market," "Fast Food Nation" and a forthcoming book on U.S. prisons, held his audience with his Distinguished Lecture Series talk about the contradictions of American society.It's a society that builds prisons for security, then fills them with the weakest members of society - nonviolent offenders, the illiterate, the mentally ill.It's a society, he said, that gives life sentences to marijuana dealers and demonizes pot but legalizes and celebrates far more toxic alcohol.Schlosser, noting the college sophomore in Colorado who died this year after consuming 40 shots, said roughly 100,000 Americans die every year from alcohol.Alcohol is connected to depression, suicides, violent crime, rape and 60 percent of all domestic violence."So this is a really heavy-duty, serious drug advertised during the Super Bowl."And marijuana - a basically harmless weed - is instead illegal in the United States and demonized.At the same time, about 140,000 people had heart attacks because of Vioxx, an approved prescription painkiller whose manufacturer long suspected was dangerous, he said.Marijuana is one of the least toxic, therapeutic substances known to man, Schlosser said."It is impossible to overdose on marijuana. Although I'm sure a lot of you know someone who's tried. Scientists have estimated that to overdose on marijuana, you would have to smoke 100 pounds a minute for 15 minutes," he said, as the crowd broke into laughter.The typical murderer in America will spend 11 or 12 years in prison, while some offenders are given stiffer sentences for marijuana crimes. "There are quite a few people serving life sentences for marijuana," Schlosser said.His conclusion: Marijuana laws have nothing to do with the plant itself and everything to do with the kinds of people who smoke it."This isn't a war on drugs. This is a war on certain people who use certain drugs. I wonder if anyone's going to go to prison for life for Vioxx?"Prison 'housing': Schlosser's last book addressed three areas of the country's estimated $650 billion underground economy: the pornography industry, marijuana cultivation and the plight of migrant workers who harvest strawberries in California.His next book, which he expects out in about a year, is an examination of prisons.In 1970 there were 200,000 people locked up in one way or another. Now there are 2.2 million, he said.If the main reason people were sent to prison was to get violent predators off the streets, Schlosser said he might support that. But in fact, not even a quarter of the people incarcerated are murderers, rapists, sex offenders, child molesters and armed robbers, he said."No society in human history has ever locked up this many people. No one has ever been rich enough to do it," Schlosser said.The typical inmate spends 2 years behind bars. "It's not like this gigantic, impermeable wall to keep away the scary people. It's kind of like a revolving door," he said.The year before getting locked up, the average prisoner made $10,000 a year, he said."This is our form of low-income housing. It's just about the only low-income housing we've built for 20 years."A high percentage of those incarcerated have a history of substance abuse and are functionally illiterate. Schlosser estimated that 350,000 suffer from serious mental illness."So when you go into the prisons of America you see the poorest, least educated, most dysfunctional, most mentally ill behind bars," he said."Our genius system of rehabilitation is to take seriously dysfunctional people, lock them up with other dysfunctional people, brutalize them for 2 years, not provide them with drug treatment, not teach them how to read, and then release them onto the streets," Schlosser said."That's been the solution."
The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
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Comment #3 posted by Sam Adams on December 04, 2004 at 09:40:09 PT
Scalia
I think Scalia is probably the most offensive person in the US government after Ashcroft. Scalia has been appointed to what is supposed to be one of the honorable judge positions in the world, supposedly a reward for a lifetime of wisdom.Yet he smirks and sneers his way through the job, openly mocking and ridiculing the principles of justice, honesty, and integrity. He flaunts conflict-of-interest rules by hunting with litigants.  A terrible example of the new political class, they don't even try to hide their corruption anymore. Wasn't Scalia the one that told all the reporters at a press conference to turn in their tapes, that they weren't allowed to print what he said? Then he got upset when it became a controversial scandal. Apparently he thinks he's the King. Dr. Slider, you're right, sometimes I worry that the real battle here was lost back in the 30's, when the government decided it could take away the individual right of a person to take their own medicine, in the amount they need.  It's fascinating that the some of founding fathers specifically warned against medical freedom, that it would someday be taken away, and it was, almost 200 years later.
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Comment #2 posted by kaptinemo on December 04, 2004 at 09:38:03 PT:
Another one who's FINALLY 'got it'.
Sidney Zion has joined an elite group of real reporters. How do I know?He(?) did his homework: *This war is 90 years old with nothing to show but failure, combined with rampant corruption.*Bang! Right there! How many newsies whose work has been read here from the feed FoM generously supplies us with EVEN KNOW how long the Fed DrugWar has rolled on?If I weren't so camera shy, I'd love to stand on a studio floor someday and ask the audience a multiple choice question: When did the Federal War on Drugs start?A) 1980 
B) 1971
C) 1937
D) 1914I'm not much of a betting man, But I'd confidently bet half a month's pay that 3 out of 4 in the audience would NEVER choose D. Yet it's the truth. The twisting of the Commerce Clause didn't start with Wickard; it began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.But Zion has struck dead center. And framed this matter in a way the antis have tried to keep out of the public's awareness for some time. After all, when you've had 90 years of failure, it's kinda hard to say that with a few more years, and a few more bucks, and (under their breath) a few more surrendered rights, by golly, we can lick the bad guys!Think what could have been done instead with all those dollars. Not to mention not having destroyed all those careers and lives.
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Comment #1 posted by dr slider on December 04, 2004 at 09:15:32 PT:
fer tha chillen
Just imagine, we've no idea what these mothers have been consuming. It would be irresponible for us to ignore the magnitide of the problem. "I don't see why these mothers insist on regressing to the snake oil days and feeding their children this so called "breast milk"." said senator Hedrite Upisass.Let nothing surprise you, we are in Crazyworld.
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