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Today, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in "Gonzales v. Raich", namely, ruling that the "commerce clause" of the Constitution (which states that the Congress can regulate interstate commerce) allows the US Congress to pass laws regarding entirely intrastate activities if they may affect interstate commerce. In this specific case, Congress has the authority to ban state approved medical marijuana. While I support medical marijuana, and in fact repealing most drug bans, what is most frightening in this case is actually the 60 year old case which was the primary influence of this decision: Wickard v. Filburn (1942).
In that case, Congress put into place limits on how much wheat people could grow in a misguided attempt to stablize the market. The farmer in question planted more than his alotment for his personal use. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled that because if enough people grew their own grain, it would impact the interstate market, Congress had the authority to regulate it.
Talk about an activist court! 60 years ago they put "what if everyone did it?" into law! With that sort of precedent, there is absolutely no limit on what Congress can do. And yet, the Radical Right is going to be trumpeting this as a victory for their puritanical moralism, blind to the glaring hypocrisy of their complaints about judicial activism. The Constitution says Congress has the authority to regulate interstate commerce. It does not say that they have the authority to take draconian steps to make sure that any particular commerce has the ability to be regulated. The 1942 decision basically said that "if everyone grows their own wheat, there won't be an interstate market, so we can limit that activity to make sure there is one".
And we wonder why we've lost the self reliance we once had.
Not that I actually think that the Wickard decision had a significant impact on people wanting to grow their own wheat, but it was a big step in turning a limited federal government into the huge, dictatorial, nanny state that we have today.
In this case, what opponents are really afraid of is that if people in California, Oregon and the other states that have legalized it, get away with it and show that it's not the boogy man the Puritans want us to believe it is, all the other states will do it too.
The one "legitimate" concern the feds have is that they'll have a hard time telling where any given marijuana came from when it crosses the border, but given the way marijuana farms are hidden now, I can't believe it'll really be any harder. In fact, with modern technology, both the chemical and biological properties can be matched to its source, and if anyone really is diverting it from an openly grown source, it's not going to be hard to find it.
I"ve said it before and I'll say it again: this country has to decide if it really wants to be free or not. Well, not really: people can keep ignoring the issue as they do now, and let the chains grow shorter and shorter, until suddenly the chains stop *them* from doing the things *they* want to, and wonder how we got to that state. This decision is a roadmap.