ISLAND VOICES
'Right' of privacy is dangerous

Thomas E. Stuart is a public school teacher who lives in Kapa'au, Hawai'i.

Advertiser staff writer Eloise Aguiar quotes Wai'anae Coast Neighborhood Board member Patty Teruya — "We want federal, state and city government to help us clean this drug out of our community" — as part of an anti-drug sign-waving crusade spreading across O'ahu ("Wai'anae Coast to join ice war," July 22).

In the same issue, columnist Lee Cataluna argues against the oft-stated notion that legalizing marijuana could solve the growing ice problem by asking, "So what is the threat of this point of view? After all, it's just a bunch of potheads making noise."

The threat Cataluna dismisses so casually may be a good deal more ominous. A working majority of Supreme Court justices may very well do yet another end run around the 10th Amendment and take this issue away from states altogether.

If so, one may safely predict the high court will rest any decision to legalize dope on the so-called "constitutional right" of privacy invented out of thin air by Justice William O. Douglas. This specious "right" is entirely unbounded.

The current disconnect between some states and the feds on the matter of so-called "medical" marijuana may be just the excuse the high court needs to intervene and legislate a new "right" to produce, distribute, sell and use dope as long as these activities are done "in private."

Once any new "right" is hatched predicated on the invented right of privacy, all minor qualifiers trotted out as fig leaves to justify that right quickly disappear as the population claiming protection swells. Legalizing abortion was originally justified based on the fig leaf that doing so was only to protect the health of the mother from septic conditions of illegal abortionists. That fig leaf quickly disappeared.

So, let's peer into the crystal ball. What hideous thing wriggles out of the gloom and twitches before our waiting eyes? A gamble that pits sign-wavers desperate to save their community from the ravages of dope against a majority of black-robed justices imprudently legislating from the bench?

For ordinary, decent folks who find themselves caught up in a Kafka-esque casino game unleashed by the court's pernicious invention of a "right" of privacy in 1965, the house odds stink.