The U.S. government has decided it’s better to let Angel Raich die than to let her smoke medical marijuana.

Right now, I’m reading Dan Baum’s masterful history of the drug war Smoke and Mirrors for the third time. I can’t recommend it enough.

What becomes abundantly clear from Baum’s reporting: Everything, everything about the prohibition of marijuana is and has always been political. It basically boils down to Richard Nixon needing a wedge issue and a hammer with which to beat the dirty hippie anti-war protesters over the head. With just a bit of research, even hardened drug warriors in Nixon’s own administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly realized marijuana was basically harmless.

From that, we have descended to a point where the government has determined it’s better that sick, crippled, suffering people (a) die, and (b) die in pain, than to give those dirty hippies the smallest of victories, even 35 years later.

Not only that, but conservatives are so adamant about not giving marijuana advocates any sort of victory whatsoever, they’ve been willing to sacrifice the decades-long fight for a return to federalis in the process–which is precisely what Angel Raich’s Supreme Court case did.

The drug war stopped being about smoking weed a long, long time ago. Today, it quite literally has become about whether or not we’re comfortable with letting the government kill its citizens in the name of promoting virtue. Not just people like Peter McWilliams and Angel Raich, but also people like Kathryn Johnston, Daniel Castillo, and Isaac Singletary, the latter three having been murdered by the Drug War in just the last six months.

NOTE: Randy Barnett says the opinion leaves room for optimism. That’s good to hear. But it appears Angel Raich has to get herself arrested before she can make those arguments. And even then, she could still lose.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 7:08 am 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.