Medical Marijuana Case

You know that I’m pretty much right in line with you BB, especially on your comments about the role of courts versus the legislature.

I have two thoughts on this case.

1.) Medical marijuana is not needed, at least not in the smoked form. They can make THC, so why don’t we just allow for THC use under prescription. The allows for the benefits, but doesn’t move toward legalization. If you ask me, smoking it up is part pain reduction and part like being the cool kid skipping school - it’s not a big deal, but you feel that you’re getting away with something.

2.) To me, the bigger issue is determining what the proper scope of the Commerce Clause is going to be. This clause is probably #2 for having the most stuff shoehorned into it (with Due Process being #1). How can mere posession affect INTER-state commerce? If you grow your own and would not be buying it otherwise, there is no effect on interstate commerce. I think this case should come out like Lopez [which for non-lawyers is a recent case which struck down the National Drug Free School Zone program because posession of a firearm near the school had nothing to do with interstate commerce]. It’s time to force the federal government, espeically Congress, to play by its own rules. Buying and selling pot, that’s one thing, but simple posession is beyond their scope. It’s a state issue.

[quote]Cory089 wrote:
You know that I’m pretty much right in line with you BB, especially on your comments about the role of courts versus the legislature.

I have two thoughts on this case.

1.) Medical marijuana is not needed, at least not in the smoked form. They can make THC, so why don’t we just allow for THC use under prescription. The allows for the benefits, but doesn’t move toward legalization. If you ask me, smoking it up is part pain reduction and part like being the cool kid skipping school - it’s not a big deal, but you feel that you’re getting away with something.
.[/quote]

Actually, many patients claim that the effects are NOT the same. They claim better pain relief, appetite stimulation and anti-anxiety from the natural form. If the pill were that easy of a solution, do you really think many would be arguing to this degree? Pimping the pill seems to be the desire of pharmecuetical agencies. They stand to not only avoid a profit, but to actually lose money should it be legalized.

Try this one article and others related:

Is it really your place to tell an AIDs or cancer patient that he should just deal with the symptoms and suck it up simply because you don’t want him to have the natural form? If they say it doesn’t work, why do you believe otherwise?

Brownies for everyone!!!

[quote]rainjack wrote:
Brownies for everyone!!![/quote]

Yeaaaahhh!! Who’s buying?

[quote]Professor X wrote:
Actually, many patients claim that the effects are NOT the same. They claim better pain relief, appetite stimulation and anti-anxiety from the natural form. If the pill were that easy of a solution, do you really think many would be arguing to this degree? Pimping the pill seems to be the desire of pharmecuetical agencies. They stand to not only avoid a profit, but to actually lose money should it be legalized.

Try this one article and others related:

Is it really your place to tell an AIDs or cancer patient that he should just deal with the symptoms and suck it up simply because you don’t want him to have the natural form? If they say it doesn’t work, why do you believe otherwise?
[/quote]

Prof:

I think this gets to the whole “prescription” aspect. If it’s going to be prescribed, then it probably is going to have to fit in an FDA approval schema – and we know what problems that would cause. If the decision comes down that people can grow it for their own medical uses, but if a doctor prescibes it it needs to fit in the FDA regulatory system, I’m sure it wouldn’t be approved for 15 years, provided you could find anyone to do the trials. I guess they could approve it for over-the-counter purchases too, but somehow I don’t see that happening…

[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
rainjack wrote:
Brownies for everyone!!!

Yeaaaahhh!! Who’s buying?
[/quote]

Buying? I already have them baking!

Mmmmmmmmm, brownies, they’re so good and yummy and… uh, what? What was I talking about…

Oh yeah! Brownies! Mmmmmmmmm…

Here’s the transcript of the oral argument in front of the USSC, in case anyone is interested:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/03-1454.pdf

DEA doesn’t like research:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/367/noumass.shtml

I wonder if this will have any real impact. Like is pointed out below, state and local authorities handle 99% of the marijuana arrests and prosecutions and they will follow state laws. So unless the DEA kicks in your door and takes your pot plants, nothing much is going to change.

Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer 25 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don’t protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug’s use to treat various illnesses.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.

The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case involving two seriously ill California women who use marijuana. The court said the prosecution of pot users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was constitutional.

“I’m going to have to be prepared to be arrested,” said Diane Monson, one of the women involved in the case.

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules.

Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state’s economic activity so long as it involves “interstate commerce” that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines.

“Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion. To date, science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective,” John Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy, said Monday.

Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, “but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these (California women) may one day be heard in the halls of Congress.”

California’s medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor’s recommendation. Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws similar to California.

In those states, doctors generally can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer,
HIV and other serious illnesses.

“The states’ core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens,” said O’Connor, who was joined in her dissent by two other states’ rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice
Clarence Thomas.

The legal question presented a dilemma for the court’s conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states’ rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.

O’Connor said she would have opposed California’s medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse “making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use.”

Alan Hopper, an
American Civil Liberties Union attorney, said that local and state officers handle 99 percent of marijuana prosecutions and must still follow any state laws that protect patients. “This is probably not going to change a lot for individual medical marijuana patients,” he said.

The case concerned two Californians, Monson and Angel Raich. The two had sued then-U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home raids or other intrusion by federal authorities.

Raich, an Oakland woman suffering from ailments including scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain, smokes marijuana every few hours. She said she was partly paralyzed until she started smoking pot. Monson, an accountant who lives near Oroville, Calif., has degenerative spine disease and grows her own marijuana plants in her backyard.

In the court’s main decision, Stevens raised concerns about abuse of marijuana laws. “Our cases have taught us that there are some unscrupulous physicians who overprescribe when it is sufficiently profitable to do so,” he said.

The case is Gonzales v. Raich, 03-1454.

Quote

BB, the bottom line is old politicians do not want marijuana legalized. It is very hard to reverse the stigma attached so that might explain the ridiculous run around the topic. You would think Cheech and Chong would have made more of a dent on the issue. I have yet to hear a good reason for why it should not be legalized for medical use aside from people ranting that “we need to save the children!!”

I’ll give you a good reason. It has nothing to do stigmas or saving the children.

It has everything to do with MONEY.

A couple of months ago I saw a report on the BBC about Un figures that show that the world wide trade in illicit drugs is $300 billion a year. It is equal in dollar value to the world wide trade in automobiles. There are very powerful criminal interests who make a lot of money from the status quo.

Around eighty percent of Americas prison population of two million prisoners is in prison on drug charges. If you multiply 1.6 million $50,000 you get $80,000,000,000 a year spent on incarcerating them. Add in another $20,000,000,000 for the DEA budget and you arrive at a figure of $100,000,000,000. This figure doesn’t include state, county and city enforcement. Every year since Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs this country has run a budget deficit. This was has been fought on borrowed money that we have to pay interest on.

The save the children arguement is the hot button issue that our politicians use to get people emotional and unthinking. What is really at stake here is hundreds of billions of dollars of pork barrel money.

What the war on drugs has not been at all successful in doing is curing America’s dependacy on drugs. America will have a drug problem as long as American’s want drugs

This money could be used to save social security or rebuild our infrastructure and to give this nation a strong and secure future.

If I can summon the strength, I’ll tell you about my best freinds fight with colon cancer and how pot played a vital roll in easing his suffering.

Have any of you heard of xyrem?

That’s prescription GHB. The same GHB that is a schedule I drug, which means it has no medical value. Except FDA approved pharmaceutical GHB. Makes perfect sense, huh?

Well, the decision came down, and medical marijuana lost. I wonder what the liberals will think of how their favorite judges voted on this?

Supreme Court Rejects State Laws
Allowing Medical-Marijuana Use

By JESS BRAVIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 7, 2005 10:02 a.m.; Page D6

The Supreme Court said the federal government can prosecute sick patients who grow and use marijuana to alleviate their symptoms, despite state laws allowing its use.

In a 6-3 opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said federal laws outlawing marijuana and finding it without any accepted medical use took precedence over laws in California and nine other states authorizing seriously ill patients to use the drug under a physician’s supervision.

Justice Stevens questioned the scientific basis and wisdom of the federal government’s policy, and offered sympathy for the severely ill patients who say the plant is their only effective treatment for debilitating pain, but he said their remedy was to petition Congress to change the law. He was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, while Antonin Scalia filed a concurrence.

The case stemmed from Proposition 215, approved by California voters in 1996, which allowed “seriously ill” patients to use marijuana when “deemed appropriate” by a physician. In 2003, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal antidrug laws didn’t apply to patients using marijuana under the state law. That court said the Commerce Clause of the federal Constitution, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce, didn’t apply to “the intrastate, noncommercial cultivation and possession of cannabis for personal medical purposes as recommended by a patient’s physician pursuant to valid California state law.”

In reversing that decision, Justice Stevens wrote that marijuana fell squarely under a 1942 precedent dealing with another crop, wheat. In that case, the court upheld a federal regulatory plan that limited the amount of wheat a farmer could grow – even though he intended to use the excess solely for home consumption. Though the farmer’s excess wheat might be “trivial by itself,” the court said in that case, national demand for the crop might decline if others did the same, affecting the overall market.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. Federalism was intended to “promote innovation,” as states explore different policy solutions, she wrote.

Eight of the 10 states with medical marijuana laws are in the Ninth Circuit, and following the San Francisco court’s ruling federal authorities halted enforcement against medical patients there, said Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Now, she said, “realistically, you can expect cases to go forward.”

Advocates for medical marijuana said their fight to win legalization wasn’t over. Attorneys for the patients said they would ask lower courts to consider arguments under constitutional provisions that weren’t in the case before the Supreme Court. (Gonzales v. Raich)

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com


And a good post from the SCOTUSblog:

http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2005/06/understanding_g.html

“Understanding” Gonzalez v. Raich
Posted by Mark Tushnet at 02:05 PM

Lewis Carroll referred comically to “Anglo-Saxon attitudes,” and for a while I thought we might regard the Supreme Court’s federalism decisions as reflecting, not so much a coherent doctrine, but an attitude toward federalism – a general lack of sympathy for claims of expansive national power, which lack could be overcome by something enough justices found sufficiently important. (Those aren’t intended to be doctrinal terms, just ordinary, conversational descriptions.)

The alternative, which I suppose is getting increasingly plausible, is that the Court doesn’t even have an attitude about federalism. What it has are, well, results. There’s Lopez and Morrison, and then there are Reno v. Condon, Guillen County, Raich, and the preemption cases.

I suppose that someone truly dedicated to making doctrinal sense of the cases – or someone who had to do so as a matter of professional obligation – could come up with something that worked. But a more parsimonious account, I suspect, would be that there are some statutes five or more justices (actually, one justice – see the final paragrpah of this post) think are more or less good ideas, and others that five or more justices think are more or less bad ideas; and that those justices will go to any (purportedly doctrinal) port in a storm to reach the results they think sensible.

One way to ask the question that results is this: Is there any statute now on the books that you would confidently say is unconstitutional on federalism grounds if you didn’t have a professional interest in or personal preference for invalidating the statute? And, if so, is the source of your confidence your understanding of federalism doctrine, or your sense of the (non-federalism related) policy preferences of five or more justices?

On a more mundane level, I suppose that the “possession of pornography” cases rattling around in the lower courts are now clearly resolved in favor of the government.

And, on a fancier level, I suppose one ought to note the artificiality of writing about “the Court” in this context. Does anyone doubt that four justices would overrule Lopez and Morrison in a second if Justice Kennedy came to them and said, “I can’t distinguish this case from Lopez and Morrison, but I don’t want to strike it down. We tried this for a decade and it didn’t work. Let’s just give up”?

[quote]Sifu wrote:
Quote

BB, the bottom line is old politicians do not want marijuana legalized. It is very hard to reverse the stigma attached so that might explain the ridiculous run around the topic. You would think Cheech and Chong would have made more of a dent on the issue. I have yet to hear a good reason for why it should not be legalized for medical use aside from people ranting that “we need to save the children!!”

I’ll give you a good reason. It has nothing to do stigmas or saving the children.

It has everything to do with MONEY.

A couple of months ago I saw a report on the BBC about Un figures that show that the world wide trade in illicit drugs is $300 billion a year. It is equal in dollar value to the world wide trade in automobiles. There are very powerful criminal interests who make a lot of money from the status quo.

Around eighty percent of Americas prison population of two million prisoners is in prison on drug charges. If you multiply 1.6 million $50,000 you get $80,000,000,000 a year spent on incarcerating them. Add in another $20,000,000,000 for the DEA budget and you arrive at a figure of $100,000,000,000. This figure doesn’t include state, county and city enforcement. Every year since Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs this country has run a budget deficit. This was has been fought on borrowed money that we have to pay interest on.

The save the children arguement is the hot button issue that our politicians use to get people emotional and unthinking. What is really at stake here is hundreds of billions of dollars of pork barrel money.

What the war on drugs has not been at all successful in doing is curing America’s dependacy on drugs. America will have a drug problem as long as American’s want drugs

This money could be used to save social security or rebuild our infrastructure and to give this nation a strong and secure future.

If I can summon the strength, I’ll tell you about my best freinds fight with colon cancer and how pot played a vital roll in easing his suffering.[/quote]

Sifu,

I’d much rather see all that enforcement power aimed at terrorism – that and the rising youth-violence problem, which will be increasing over the next few years if you believe that this problem is inherently one of demographics (i.e. more young males between the ages of 15-30, especially among the lower economic strata, means more crime).

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

Sifu,

I’d much rather see all that enforcement power aimed at terrorism – that and the rising youth-violence problem, which will be increasing over the next few years if you believe that this problem is inherently one of demographics (i.e. more young males between the ages of 15-30, especially among the lower economic strata, means more crime).[/quote]

Ah yes. Remember those ads they ran during the Super Bowl two years ago saying something along the line that if you buy drugs, it supports terrorism? Hell, even SNL in its prime couldn’t have written a funnier skit. I sincerely doubt that Otto the Bus Driver wearing a Slayer shirt down the street from me selling weed out of his house is a member of al-Qaeda or even the local Klan.

But seriously, decriminalization is a good start, and some states have made it equivalent to a traffic ticket to be caught with pot, but it’s still just a patch over a festering wound. If total legalization were to occur, the effects would be huge. I’m against taxing ANYTHING, but if they cut taxes in other places to be replaced by drug revenues, I could live with it.

Legalization would empty the prisons of small-time criminals and free up the courts. It would have an effect OUTSIDE the US that would be immeasurable. Now, coke is a nasty drug that no one should do, but that doesn’t mean I think you should be a criminal for doing it. If that crap was legal, Colombia might be a nice place to take a cheap vacation. Furthermore, farmers could start making an honest living there and stop worrying about which faction was coming to push them around today.

It’s weird. The younger generation in this country seems to be almost top-to-bottom in favor of legalization, no matter what their general political take is. Yet still, things like this Supreme Court reversal happen. The lunatics are truly running the asylum in DC. All we can hope is that eventually they’ll all get old and die.

The superbowl ads were laughable but not funny.

The way I see it, the people who make money off of the war on drugs are not above using a national tragedy to try and reinvigorate support for thier money makeing scheme.

If those ads are to be believed consider this. The power to take away this business from criminals rests in the hands of the government. With the stroke of a pen the government could take all this business over instantly.

Think about what would happen to gang culture in this country if we took away this business.

I think it would have a significant impact on youth, because you would remove the rich drug dealer as a role model.

I also think that if you removed the profit motive a lot less adults would be willing to supply kids. What would be the point.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board evinces an appropriately skeptical view of Raich:

High on the Commerce Clause
June 8, 2005; Page A14

We’ve never supported drug legalization, even in its “medical marijuana” drag. Still, we can’t help but feel uneasy about the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision Monday in Gonzales v. Raich, which held that the federal government can trump state laws permitting the possession and cultivation of small quantities of cannabis for purely personal use.

As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent: “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything, and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.” By “enumerated powers,” Justice Thomas means the idea that the federal government can undertake only such activities as the Constitution explicitly permits.

Hence the 10th Amendment, which reserves those powers not listed – such as criminal law enforcement – to the states. President James Madison, the Constitution’s primary author, famously vetoed a highway bill in 1817: “The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers…”

How things have changed – largely as a result of New Deal-era jurisprudence holding that the federal government’s Constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce could be used to justify all sorts of previously unimagined powers. This can be a good thing, when what we are truly talking about is interstate commerce.

But by the 1990s federal law making had grown so unhinged from any plausible Commerce Clause justification that it provoked a minor Supreme Court backlash. In 1995 in United States v. Lopez, the Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act on the grounds that gun possession near a school was not an economic activity. And in United States v. Morrison, the Court struck down portions of the Violence Against Women Act on similar grounds.

Raich would appear to end the Lopez line of reasoning, since the two decisions don’t seem reconcilable. If, as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his majority concurrence, non-economic activities can be regulated so long as they are part of a “comprehensive scheme of regulation,” there would appear to be no federal power the Commerce Clause couldn’t theoretically justify.

And let no one be deluded that the democratic preference of America’s largest state isn’t being trampled here. We didn’t support the California medical marijuana ballot initiative at issue in Raich. But a clear majority of Californians did. Just because an issue is “important” doesn’t mean it should be a matter for federal law. Almost all homicide is regulated at the state level, and contentious issues like abortion rights are best handled not by judicial fiat but by democratic compromises in the 50 states. Who knows what further intrusions into the rights of local polities the Raich decision may one day be used to justify?

Such stakes explain why many conservative legal scholars such as former Reagan Assistant Attorney General Douglas Kmiec and former Bush Solicitor General Charles Fried urged the court to recognize that federal powers shouldn’t extend this far. But Justices Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, who voted to limit federal powers in Lopez and Morrison, appear to have retreated from putting any restraint on Commerce Clause-based regulation. This was not a good decision for anyone who believes there are Constitutional limits on the federal leviathan.


Some conservatives seem to be taking this view, espoused below by William F. Buckley, Jr., which basically gives up on the idea that the federal government is in fact limited in any way at all by the fact it has no general police powers – but I’m a bit too young to take such a resigned stance on things… I think he’s too neat by half in avoiding the whole issue of the Commerce Power.

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200506071421.asp

June 07, 2005, 2:21 p.m.
The Court on High
Medical Marijuana and the Supremes.

The Supreme Court did what conservative court-watchers should welcome. It looked the California situation in the face and said: If Congress doesn’t like the law, let Congress change it, but don’t look to the Supreme Court to improvise on the drug laws.

There are now four collateral movements in the matter of the use of medical marijuana where individual states have authorized it:

  1. Federal prosecutors are free, after this clarification from the Supreme Court, to proceed to arrest users, on the grounds that the law is the law.

  2. The plaintiffs in the current case were two ailing women. Having lost with the Supreme Court, they have said that they intend to continue to use marijuana. One of them said that, actually, she has no alternative, because if she doesn’t take the drug, she will simply die.

  3. Observers sympathetic to the state laws allowing marijuana for medical purposes take comfort in realism. There aren’t enough federal prosecutors in town to move against all the users. One estimate is that only one percent of such transgressions is actually meeting up with intervention by the federal constabulary.

  4. In his opinion, Justice Stevens hinted that there were two ways to address the deadlock. The first and most obvious, of course, is for Congress to revise the current statute to make the exception for medical marijuana. But there is another approach, namely for the Executive to reclassify marijuana for medical purposes.

How will these sentiments and inclinations fare?

The easiest way is to treat laws banning medical marijuana about as anti-sodomy laws were treated for generations: Don’t repeal them, but don’t act on them. There is a theoretical objection to this escapist remedy ? we like to think that laws are there to be obeyed. But to proceed under its empirical protection is an easygoing solution to hard, conflicting pressures.

The relief ? hinted at by Justice Stevens ? that might be got by the Executive’s adjusting the proscribed list to permit medical marijuana is opposed by the hardliners in the administration.

These ? in particular John P. Walters the drug czar ? are relying on dogmatic positions which especially outrage those who have had relief from marijuana during their illnesses. Mr. Walters takes the position that it is not medically established that marijuana uniquely grants such relief as is being touted. Nothing is more infuriating to a person who has been relieved of crippling nausea than to be told that he has not been relieved. It is almost predictable, for reasons of political harmony and acuity, that the administration will dodge that problem by simply ? doing nothing.

What is depressing is the dim prospect of remedial congressional action. Individual congressmen shun the idea of licensing any use of marijuana, unless they can find a way to say that marijuana eliminates income disparity. But in search of political consensus on the matter, there is nothing clearer than the vote of the legislatures of the ten states that authorized medical marijuana. They did so and survived political vicissitudes. If these ten states can take a progressive position on medical marijuana why can’t Congress do as much?

There is opposition to be sure from more sophisticated observers. What they are saying is that the whole medical marijuana argument is something of a phony. It is certainly true that a lot of people who would like to use marijuana will go to lengths to feign a medical reason for doing so.

But if a federal prosecutor is bent on practicing his profession, he is in a position to establish that the doctor whose name the scofflaw is citing as having prescribed marijuana ? didn’t really do so, or did so in such ambiguous terms as to persuade the jury that the marijuana user is in contempt of the law. On this front, the permissivists have an eloquent martyr, the late Peter McWilliams who ardently championed looser laws, who himself depended on marijuana for relief from the nausea caused by AIDS ? and who died during a period when he was under court scrutiny, pending sentencing, and had to do without the drug.

Taking marijuana when young is a stupid thing to do, but the young generation is not (yet) suffering from cancer and AIDS and other diseases from the ravages of which they might find relief, if they can dance through the congestion of laws and opinions that beset us.

I have a disorder called restless leg syndrome and this works better than “parkinson’s” medication they give me for it, but not one doctor I have talked to approves(social stigma?). I have talked to more people that I can count that this works for . It’s frustrating that something so simple would work…yet they will gime me something with will cause stiffening of the heart valves and scarring of the lungs.

This case clearly shows the cruel extremes that people who profit from the war on drugs will go to in order to protect their business.

In this matter the Bush administration has been very conservative in its compassion, whilst radical in it’s cruelty.

A good number of people who want to use medical marijuana are dying. What is at issue here is whether or not we are willing to provide the maximum amount of comfort to a dying person.

If one were to write a modern day version of the trials of Job cancer and chemo therapy would be part of the story.

Nausea does not adequetly describe what some cancer victims have to deal with.

Let me give you some idea.

My best freind was an Alpha Male in the truest sense of the word. The first part of his treatment for colon cancer was a 12hour operation where he was cut from his sternum to his pubic bone.

Every organ in his body was removed and inspected and cancerous growths were removed. They even pulled his testicles out of his scrotum inspected them then crammed them back.

The major part of the surgery involved severing his rectum from his anus then removing his rectum, entire large intestine and the last two feet of his small intestine. Then his small intestine was attached to his anus so he didn’t have to be on a colostomy bag.

After the operation, I’ll never forget him lying in bed staring at the incision in disbelief. I can only imagine what was going through his mind. It hurt to watch.

To go from a strong, healthy, virile, Alpha Male to a weak, helpless, invalid was a terribly cruel blow. I could tell just by looking at him.

Next came chemo. The doctors tried every type of chemo to no avail. Every chemo had it’s own insidious side affect. The final one made it so that any food or liquid that wasn’t at least body temperature felt like needles going down.

This torture continued until a new tumor appeared in his intestine.

Within a few months his digestive tract became a two way operation. With his mouth taking over the task that his anus was no longer able to do. It was at this time that he stopped eating food. A month and a half later he died.

Now, for me, the term verbal diarrhea conjurs up a graphic image that I can’t bear to be reminded of.

The only thing that could improve my boys appetite was smoking weed. The doctors gave him marinol pills. They are not the same thing as weed. Marinol pills do not look, smell, taste or feel the same.

My boy loved smoking weed. In better times not much gave him a greater pleasure than cruising around Belle Isle with a fat blunt in his mouth and a skinny hoe on his knee. At the end when he didn’t even want to do that I knew it was over. I think he would dwell upon the futility of his situation and it freaked him out, so he quit.

This decision by the administration to pursue this case, it doesn’t just hurt the people who are dying. It also hurts the people who are trying to make a loved ones final days as comfortable as possible.

My boy suffered the trials of Job. It hurt to watch. What makes his suffering hurt even more is the callous attitude of the Bush administration and the Supreme court towards people like him.

Wow, that is truly sad. I cannot even begin to imagine.

What is also sad is that the government portrays cannabis use by people like him to be just a ploy by people who want to give crack to children. It’s totally absurd!