Posted on 08/13/2008 6:30:00 PM PDT by microgood
When Owen Beck was 17, doctors amputated his right leg to stop the spread of bone cancer. His parents, desperate to find a drug that would relieve their son's excruciating phantom limb pain, brought him to Charlie Lynch's medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay, Calif., carrying a recommendation from a Stanford University oncologist. The marijuana not only eased the pain but also alleviated the nausea caused by chemotherapy.
Called to testify as a character witness in Lynch's federal marijuana trial, Beck did not get far. When he mentioned his cancer, U.S. District Judge George Wu cut him off and sent him packing. Wu decreed there would be no talk of the symptoms marijuana relieves, no references to California's recognition of marijuana as a medicine, no mention even of the phrase “medical marijuana” in front of the jury.
In short, there would be no explanation of how Lynch came to operate what prosecutors called a “marijuana store” in downtown Morro Bay for a year, openly serving more than 2,000 customers. Under federal law, which forbids marijuana use for any purpose, all that was irrelevant. So it's hardly surprising that Lynch was convicted last week of five marijuana-related offenses that carry penalties of five to 85 years in prison.
Nor is it surprising that so many self-described conservatives, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain, support the prosecution of people like Charlie Lynch, abandoning their avowed federalist principles because of blind hostility toward a plant they associate with draft-dodging, flag-burning hippies. It's not surprising, but it's shameful.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has raided more than 60 medical marijuana dispensaries in the last two years. Because the deck is stacked against them, dispensary operators facing federal drug charges typically plead guilty.
Lynch instead gambled on a defense known as entrapment by estoppel, which occurs when someone is arrested for actions the government assured him were legal. Before he opened Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers in 2006, Lynch called the DEA to ask about his legal exposure. He says an agent told him he should consult with state and local authorities, which he took to mean he could avoid trouble as long as he complied with state and local law.
It's not hard to see why Lynch believed he was operating a legitimate business. He had the blessing of the Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce and the city council; local officials, including Morro Bay's mayor, posed for pictures at the dispensary's opening; and neither his neighbors nor the city police objected.
At Lynch's trial the DEA denied giving him any sort of green light, or even a yellow one. But the response he says he got from the agency is the response he should have gotten, because under the U.S. Constitution the medical use of marijuana is a local matter.
At one time John McCain seemed to acknowledge as much. In April 2007 he said, “I will let states decide that issue." But he quickly abandoned that position, and this year he said he'd continue the DEA's medical marijuana raids, declaring, “It is a national issue and not a [state] issue." By contrast, McCain's Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, has promised to stop the raids.
McCain's medical marijuana position contradicts his professed allegiance to federalism. “The federal government was intended to have limited scope," he says on his website, vowing to appoint judges who “respect the proper role of local and state governments."
That commitment is inconsistent with reading Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce broadly enough to cover homegrown medical marijuana, as the Supreme Court did in 2005. “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause," Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his dissent, “it can regulate virtually anything -- and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."
By supporting the Bush administration's medical marijuana policy, McCain is renouncing such concerns. Worse, his promise to flout the Constitution probably will enhance his appeal among conservatives.
medical mary jane is a canard
It slipped the leash long go. We no longer live under the system of government bequeathed to us by the Founders, IMHO.
On what do you base this assertion?
stumble-fingers strike again... or fail to
I agree.
The medical marijuana crowd was just too gutless to put it on the ballot as a full legalization.
Smoking anything is bad for you...
I HAVE AN IDEA...
PUT A MEDICAL TOBACCO INITIATIVE ON THE BALLOT!
The politically correct fascists will literally defecate!
mary jane creates total wastrels where real people used to be
If they can take heroin and make a useful drug that is available by prescription, why can’t that be done with marijuana? People should not have to inhale smoke to get the benefits of a medicine. Make it available legally and in another form.
Precisely. Watch the “Law and Order” conservatives rail against marijuana and then lean back and take a hearty sip of Beer.
There are few issues that make people as nutty as the regulation of what people put do to their bodies.
Conservatives tend to come down against smoking bans.
Liberals tend to be for them.
Conservatives tend to come down against pot smokers.
Liberals tend to be for them.
Nutty!
Disclaimer: I neither drink, smoke, nor do drugs. I just don’t care what you do to your body. I like mine clean and sober thank you.
Whether it is or is not, I prefer to let the States make the decision. Might as well do away with the States altogether with such a broad reading of the Commerce Clause anyway.
MaryJane was indeed one of the few effective “drugs” against chemo side-effects 20+ years ago.
There’s been a lot of progress since then, including a synthetic pill form of the same ingredients of MJ. There is no reason to buy pot for “medicine”.
If people want to legalize it — and I’m ambivalent on this issue — at least they shouldn’t try to use a straw man to do it.
They'll cheer the federal drug war, and then bitch about the federal abuse of power over things like the Endangered Species Act, or federal "hate crime" laws.
Clarence Thomas gets it.
“If they can take heroin and make a useful drug that is available by prescription, why can’t that be done with marijuana?”
Cocaine has medical uses too, and hospitals buy it legally all the time. That still doesn’t give anyone an excuse to to smoke some crack.
They all seem to say they want SC justices that hold an "original intent" interpretation of the Constitution, but they don't seem to want representatives or executives that practice it.
“They’ll cheer the federal drug war, and then bitch about the federal abuse of power over things like the Endangered Species Act, or federal “hate crime” laws.”
Here are my options:
1. Deal w/ drug abuses like we have been doing. We fill up the jails, have drug wars (akin to Al Capone’s alcohol wars in the 1930’s), and basically don’t solve the problem.
2. We follow the Amsterdam example. We legalize it, grade it, tax it. We then get drug parties in parks, still get theft and violence, and still have people ruining not only their lives, but the lives of their families. We still don’t solve the problem.
So, yeah, I’d love to legalize MJ. I don’t smoke it, although I tried it a few times and I DID inhale and I kinda enjoyed it. Still, can anyone show me where we can legalize the stuff and not have MORE problems than we have now?
"Might as well"? Have you taken a look at what the feds do with the "grants" they make to the states -- first the enticement to accept the grant and subsequently the threat of its withdrawal or reduction??
Way too often the cost of implementing the latest requirement goes WAY above what the requirement would cost to execute, and that's what I tell my state legislators on specific issues. And I've seen other states proceed (their shares enlarged by the monies we gave up) and find -- lo and behold, this costs MUCH more than the proffered monies! Gee whillickers; if *I* could figger that out...
The system has flaws and is broken. But there are too many vested interests with no incentive to fix it.
Draw your own conclusions.
Sadly, I have reluctantly come to agree with you. I will only make the exception that [some?/most?] conservatives want this. Not all do, I just don’t have the numbers.
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