It's existence made those who supported the ban on semi-automatic firearms pay for their temerity. Second Amendment activists were woke up by that Clinton Era piece of legislation, and as a result turned the Democrats out of Congress, and then proceeded to enact gun carry laws all across the land. They have subsequently pursued protection of gun rights through the courts until we have reached the point where the Highest court itself has issued a decisions solidifying the legal protection for individuals to own and carry firearms. The Second Amendment has attained the highest level of protection for the rights it guarantees for the first time in a hundred years.
The New Deal "substantial effects" interpretation of the Commerce Clause is a very real threat to your RKBA, and you're blind if you can't see that.
I do not disagree with you here. Wickard v. Filburn has emerged as a great threat to freedom in this nation, but excessive misuse of the commerce clause is not a valid issue regarding drug usage. Drugs fall into the catagory of attack upon the nation, and their interdiction is justified under the national defense portion of the U.S. Constitution. Just as we ban nerve gas, biological agents, and fissionable Uranium, so to do we have the right and the authority to ban dangerous substances that constitute a threat to our nations ability to defend itself.
Drugs are dangerous, and if not stopped, they will destroy our Nation, the way Opium destroyed the Nation of China. They constitute a military threat, not an argument about where the commerce powers begin and end.
Nothing in the Constitution, or the New Deal interpretation of the Commerce Clause makes that distinction. The standard is the Congress can regulate anything it "finds to have a substantial effect on interstate commerce". That is the basis of their claim of authority to conduct the drug war, and the reality is that the price of accepting that is accepting everything else they do under that claim of authority.
If we want federal government to wage a domestic drug war, then we need to enumerate the power for them to do that.