In his opinion today, Justice Stevens basically said the only hope for patients who use marijuana would be for Congress to pass a law authorizing its use.

As it turn out, there’s legislating pending that would go nearly as far. The Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment would bar the Justice Department from raiding the homes of patients who use marijuana in states where it’s legal.

Another bill, the “Truth in Trials Act,” would let juries know when a defendant in federal court is being prosecuted for marijuana-related crimes in states where the drug is legal. It would prevent outrages like the Ed Rosenthall case, in which Rosenthall’s federal court jury wasn’t allowed to hear that Rosenthall was growing marijuana for the city of Oakland.

Let’s get both these passed.

The blogosphere’s been abuzz with near-universal condemnation of the Raich decision all day. Disagreement seems to spill across the ideological and philosophical spectrum.

Blogs have also proven deft at triggering resignations, firings, retractions, and exposing conflict. Why not see if we can put this medium to use to bring relief to sick people?

The public is clearly way ahead of the politicians on this one. My hunch is that the politicians continue to vote the way they do because they don’t feel any political pressure to vote otherwise.

I’m pretty cynical about grassroots efforts to effect change. But what the hell? We don’t really have any other choice at this point. And if blogs can motivate the move to get Trent Lott to resign, CBS News staffers fired, and a CNN producer canned, why couldn’t we devote as much keyboard-pounding, verbiage, and drumbeat-generating toward getting Congress to put an end to federal agents pointing assault weapons at cancer patients?

Consider this a challenge. If you blogged about Raich today, give us at least three posts a week for the next three months aimed at making Hinchey-Rohrabacher and the Truth in Trials Act law. Let’s find out what Congressmen are standing in either bill’s way. Let’s shame them. Let’s pursuade those on the fence to come down off of it. If you lean Republican, and your Congressman is a GOPer who has voted against bills like these, explain their hypocrisy to them. Ask them what happened to federalism, the Tenth Amendment, and the right of states to set their own rules and policies when it comes to medical treatment.

I’m sure there are other bills that would do some good, too (if you feel any of them deserve passage ahead of the two I’ve mentioned, post why, and maybe we’ll change the goal). But we’ll start with these. Three posts per week.

Let’s make John Walter’s job really, really difficult.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 8:04 pm by Radley Balko 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.