Feds may enforce ban on marijuana, justices rule

By Tom Strode - Jun 15, 2005

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 6 a federal drug-control law supersedes a state measure permitting the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

The justices voted 6-3 to reverse a lower court decision blocking enforcement of a federal statute that prohibits marijuana use. The high court agreed with the Bush administration it should be able to prosecute California patients who have used medicinal marijuana they have grown or been given under a state law permitting such utilization of the federally banned substance.

Congress had a “rational basis for believing that failure to regulate the intrastate manufacture and possession of marijuana would leave a gaping hole” in the federal law regulating marijuana and other illegal drugs, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court.

Opponents of the liberalization of the country’s anti-drug laws hailed the opinion.

“Everyone who is concerned about the epidemic of drub abuse afflicting our culture, with the horrendous toll in human life and suffering left in its wake, should be relieved that the Supreme Court understands that the regulation of illicit drugs in the end must be a federal issue,” said Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “There must be a 50-state-wide standard, not a patchwork quilt of various exceptions in differing states. Marijuana is extremely addictive and is virtually 100 percent a gateway drug to even more harmful illicit and illegal drugs.”

The decision impacts not only California but nine other states that have approved the medical use of marijuana. They are Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

The laws that clashed in the case were a 1970 federal statute, the Controlled Substances Act, which bars the use of marijuana and other illegal drugs, and the Compassionate Use Act, a measure approved by California voters in a 1996 referendum that permits medical marijuana use with the recommendation of a doctor.

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