9-10 June 2005
There are things going on, which I can't introduce yet, but it will make this blogging that I'm on much more worthwhile to all the people I am trying to befriend. I have to do a few more things to refine it, but it's happening. So, in the meantime, I have to fulfill a few promises I made.
First, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Raich, which involved the matter of the use of medical marijuana, was just decided on Monday. A very long and interesting story about the High Court's decision was published in Law.com on Tuesday the 7th. This is more than about the basic facts of the federal government's ban on possession of marijuana for commercial purposes with the state of California's law allowing medically-prescribed use of marijuana. This was about the clash of the U.S. federal system and the interests of its states, and about the conflict of the values held by Americans. It's a conflict between those Americans who believe, irregardless of what they believe about the nature of government in the United States, in a Judeo-Christian-based traditionalist set of mores, and those who embrace a European, secularist model of morality, that is if there is any such thing. (And the truth is: under relativism, there is no such thing as morality, it's as fluid and changeful as water.).
Here's what I mean. The Controlled Substances Act is a very long list of prohibited hallucinogenic drugs, which a more tradition-based society has long ago decided were not only harmful to the individual's own health, but a harm to the very fabric of society itself. It goes to the very concept that an autonomous individual is not answerable to society in the areas of personal pleasure/self-gratification, and rejects it. The prohibitions in the CSA are the essence of the expression of a Judeo-Christian idea that "no man lives to himself, no man dies to himself." The passage by 10 states, led by California, that a doctor's prescription, which is pretty badly monitored by anybody's honest estimate, can give carte blanche to anyone with a medically definable illness to not only use, but grow marijuana, is the essence of a utilitarian, relativist attitude toward such drug use. That philosophy is straight out of Europe's own changing society, shaped by the ideas of the whole European philosophical establishment from Rousseau and the Enlightenment to Marcuse and Camus in the 20th century.
And for those who say that this California law is about those who suffer from painful and degenerative diseases I reply that the notion that marijuana is the only effective painkiller or that any number of nutritional and herbal programs of treatment can't be equally or even better for these victims, I have oceanfront property in Arizona or in the Sahara I would like to sell you. The problem is, as the Court's majority opinion of Justice John Stevens, said, to ignore the open door to public commercial distribution of marijuana would have been irresponsible.
For the Supreme Court to have held that California's law trumped the CSA's prohibition of marijuana possession would have struck at the very raison d'etre of the drug laws and 'drug war' of the United States. The end of such drug laws as unconstitutional would be an inevitable later end result. The Netherlands may be able to handle such a state of moral chaos, but I doubt that they ultimately will. There is no way that the United States, bordering Mexico, with huge immigrant populations easily reachable from all over the world, especially from Latin America, with a highly diverse and urbanized population of over 300 million souls, would be able to tolerate its plunge into a charnal house that would result.
If you want to read more about the case, there is also another really good review of the case in the blog The Volokh Conspiracy, by Orin Kerr, a respected lawyer and law professor from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. And of course, the case can be accessed here. They will take a different view from mine, but their arguments are quite interesting and challenging.
Well, away I go. Tomorrow (today) I try to make myself useful and get clients downtown. Because I'm not so well-capitalized, I have to do it the hard way, but oh well.
God bless, and adios.
First, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Raich, which involved the matter of the use of medical marijuana, was just decided on Monday. A very long and interesting story about the High Court's decision was published in Law.com on Tuesday the 7th. This is more than about the basic facts of the federal government's ban on possession of marijuana for commercial purposes with the state of California's law allowing medically-prescribed use of marijuana. This was about the clash of the U.S. federal system and the interests of its states, and about the conflict of the values held by Americans. It's a conflict between those Americans who believe, irregardless of what they believe about the nature of government in the United States, in a Judeo-Christian-based traditionalist set of mores, and those who embrace a European, secularist model of morality, that is if there is any such thing. (And the truth is: under relativism, there is no such thing as morality, it's as fluid and changeful as water.).
Here's what I mean. The Controlled Substances Act is a very long list of prohibited hallucinogenic drugs, which a more tradition-based society has long ago decided were not only harmful to the individual's own health, but a harm to the very fabric of society itself. It goes to the very concept that an autonomous individual is not answerable to society in the areas of personal pleasure/self-gratification, and rejects it. The prohibitions in the CSA are the essence of the expression of a Judeo-Christian idea that "no man lives to himself, no man dies to himself." The passage by 10 states, led by California, that a doctor's prescription, which is pretty badly monitored by anybody's honest estimate, can give carte blanche to anyone with a medically definable illness to not only use, but grow marijuana, is the essence of a utilitarian, relativist attitude toward such drug use. That philosophy is straight out of Europe's own changing society, shaped by the ideas of the whole European philosophical establishment from Rousseau and the Enlightenment to Marcuse and Camus in the 20th century.
And for those who say that this California law is about those who suffer from painful and degenerative diseases I reply that the notion that marijuana is the only effective painkiller or that any number of nutritional and herbal programs of treatment can't be equally or even better for these victims, I have oceanfront property in Arizona or in the Sahara I would like to sell you. The problem is, as the Court's majority opinion of Justice John Stevens, said, to ignore the open door to public commercial distribution of marijuana would have been irresponsible.
For the Supreme Court to have held that California's law trumped the CSA's prohibition of marijuana possession would have struck at the very raison d'etre of the drug laws and 'drug war' of the United States. The end of such drug laws as unconstitutional would be an inevitable later end result. The Netherlands may be able to handle such a state of moral chaos, but I doubt that they ultimately will. There is no way that the United States, bordering Mexico, with huge immigrant populations easily reachable from all over the world, especially from Latin America, with a highly diverse and urbanized population of over 300 million souls, would be able to tolerate its plunge into a charnal house that would result.
If you want to read more about the case, there is also another really good review of the case in the blog The Volokh Conspiracy, by Orin Kerr, a respected lawyer and law professor from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. And of course, the case can be accessed here. They will take a different view from mine, but their arguments are quite interesting and challenging.
Well, away I go. Tomorrow (today) I try to make myself useful and get clients downtown. Because I'm not so well-capitalized, I have to do it the hard way, but oh well.
God bless, and adios.
