It’s quite a thrill to be asked to do some agitating here, and I’m looking forward to working with this “illustrious” group, while doing some crossposting at Drug WarRant. The only down side is that when I click on The Agitator, instead of reading Radley, I’ll be reading… me.

I’ll be reporting on the Drug War, and related governmental stupidities. If you’re a big fan of the Drug Czar or like spending lots of money locking up pot smokers, you might want to skip my posts.

The big news I’m watching today is the Supreme Court oral arguments of Raich v. Ashcroft — a case about medical marijuana, states’ rights, restrictions on centralized government, and more (I’ve created a guide to the case to help you out). We learned in the Supreme Court today that the federal government can’t do math very well (just a mis-placed decimal point), and that Justice Stevens is a little unclear on how demand affects price. Beyond that, until I get a complete and accurate transcript, I can’t give a good analysis, but there are a few places to get some early snap coverage and analysis:

Lawrence Sulom’s Legal Theory Blog has a fairly complete recap and analysis. Timothy Lynch’s report at the Crime and Federalism blog is a little more pessimistic (Mr. Lynch is with the Cato Institute and co-authored an amicus brief in Raich), and Tom Goldstein at SCOTUS blog has decided to predict a unanimous vote in favor of the federal government. However, it’s way too early to tell what the Justices will do.

Oh, and skip the news media. They really don’t have a clue that this case is about more than medical marijuana. They’re particularly dense when it comes to understanding federalism. One of my favorites:

Kendall Coffee at CNN:

However, Rick, let’s look at the practical side. Are you really going to tell a DEA agent that when he goes through the door to make a bust that he’s got to find out if the narcotics were locally grown or not? That’s a very difficult implementation thing, and the fact is that we do see the war on drugs as a national challenge, as a national problem, as a national crisis still.

Kendall, have you heard of state and local police? Or should we just do away with all of them and have the federal police (so thoughtfully provided for in the constitution) take care of all those marijuana possession busts?

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By the way (and off topic) if you haven’t done so yet, please read Radley’s outstanding fisking of Sager. Great stuff!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2004 at 9:53 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.