States’ Rights and Medical Marijuana
States’ Rights and Medical Marijuana
J. Bradley Jansen
May 24, 2001
The Supreme Court recently gave us an apparently schizophrenic ruling on medical marijuana and states’ rights. The gist of the ruling is that states can pass laws and initiatives allowing patients to grow, possess, and use medical marijuana under state law.
However the passage of such laws does not give those people a “medical necessity” defense under federal law.
The 8-0 ruling in U.S. v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (No. 00-151) spoke clearly but such a simultaneous ruling begs several questions.
What is the benefit of overlapping and contradictory state and federal laws? At which level of government should these questions be decided? Should these questions be decided primarily by legislators or doctors? I think most people know that our current, sometimes contradictory, policies are not “keeping drugs off our streets” or “protecting our children from the scourge of drugs.”
Our country recognizes a bias that our legislative leaders’ authority comes from consent of the governed. Fresh from the Revolutionary War securing our independence and freedom, our Founding Fathers tried to set up a constitution that safeguarded states’ rights and tried to protect its citizens from an overbearing government.
The Supreme Court gave us a clear signal that Congress should address this confusing complexity of state medical marijuana laws that run counter to federal laws. Two questions need to be addressed: Is a federal law better than numerous, potentially different state laws? And, should we pass laws allowing for the medical use of marijuana?
In March 1999, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine released its landmark study, Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. The report was unequivocal when it concluded, “there are some limited circumstances in which we recommend smoking marijuana for medical uses.”
Some of the wide range of therapeutic uses of smoking marijuana include relieving nausea and increasing appetite, reducing muscle spasms and spasticity, relieving chronic pain, and reducing intraocular, or “within the eye,” pressure.
Because of these uses, many patients and their doctors have found marijuana to be beneficial in treating the symptoms of AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, and other serious conditions. Further medical studies of the benefits and potential problems associated with the use of medical marijuana is clearly needed.
Since nearly all marijuana arrests in the nation are made by state and local—not federal—officials, many patients suffering from conditions where marijuana can be beneficial may consider the risk worth the benefit. A better response would be for the Congress to polish off its respect for states’ rights and the consent of the governed and devolve this issue back to the 50 laboratories of democracy.