Posted on: Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Ruling trumps states' choice on medical pot

By Gina Holland
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court's elderly members have dealt with cancer, chronic back pain and other ailments. They've also lost spouses, children and friends to illness.

Against that backdrop the justices voted today, with some apparent reservations, to let federal agents arrest people who use pot to ease their pain, even in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

The court's 6-3 decision was suffused with sympathy for two seriously ill California women who brought the case.

Justice John Paul Stevens, an 85-year-old cancer survivor, said the court was not passing judgment on the potential medical benefits of marijuana, and he noted "the troubling facts" in the case. However, he said the Constitution allows federal regulation of homegrown marijuana.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whose recent bout of thyroid cancer has stirred speculation that he will step down soon, opposed the decision. The 80-year-old has chronic back pain, and his wife died in 1991 of ovarian cancer.

He signed a dissent, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that said the court decision wrongly "extinguishes" state trials for medical marijuana.

The ruling does not strike down California's law, or similar ones in Alaska, Colorado, Hawai'i, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. Besides those states, Arizona permits marijuana prescriptions but has never instituted a program to support them. In Maryland, people accused of violating state possession laws can present evidence to a judge of a medicinal use of the drug; the judge could then lower the punishment to a $100 fine.

However, today's ruling may hurt efforts to pass laws in other states because the federal government's prosecution authority trumps states' wishes.

In her dissent, O'Connor, who like Rehnquist has had cancer, said the court's "overreaching stifles an express choice by some states, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently."

O'Connor was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. O'Connor said that she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use."

Thomas said the ruling was so broad "the federal government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives and potluck suppers throughout the 50 states."