High court sides with feds, OKs medicinal marijuana prosecutions

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, patients that grow their own marijuana without purchasing it, affects the cost of such drugs in other states. Therefore the federal government can prosecute medical marijuana users even though it is legal in their state and they have a prescription because it affects the cost of these drugs being sold illegally in other states.

“In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court had opened the door to nearly unlimited government regulation.”

According to Justice O’Connor, “The court’s definition of economic activity . . . threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach, ... To draw the line wherever private activity affects the demand for market goods is to draw no line at all. We have already rejected the result that would follow – a federal police power.”

WASHINGTON – Siding with federal authority over states’ rights and compassion for terminally ill patients, the Supreme Court said Monday that the government can prosecute sick people who smoke pot as a painkiller – even in states where such use is legal.

The 6-3 ruling, which crossed the court’s usual ideological lines, doesn’t invalidate laws in the 10 states that have approved medical marijuana, but it does deflate their power to protect users and doctors who prescribe the drug.

The court said the regulation of illicit drugs is a matter of interstate commerce, reserved exclusively to the federal government by the Constitution. That includes regulating local activities, such as the growing and consumption of medical marijuana, that could have an effect on interstate markets. So the federal Controlled Substance Act of 1970, which classifies marijuana as a drug unacceptable for any use, holds sway over any state provisions that say otherwise.

The decision means patients such as Diane Monson and Angel Raich, the California women who challenged the federal law, risk federal prosecution if they don’t stop growing and smoking marijuana.

Raich said Monday that her decision was a no-brainer.

“If I stop using it, I would die,” said Raich, who admitted she…

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