The acceptance of medical marijuana is growing, and this will only accelerate the movement:
Medical necessity doesn't shield medical-marijuana users from federal prosecution, a clearly sympathetic federal appeals court ruled today in an Oakland woman's case that earlier went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Nothing in the common law or our cases suggests that the existence of a necessity defense empowers this court to enjoin the enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act as to one defendant," 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harry Pregerson wrote.
The court also mulled whether the Constitution's guarantee of due process of law embraces a right to make a life-shaping decision, on a doctor's advice, to use medical marijuana to avoid intolerable pain and preserve life when all other prescribed medications have failed.
[. . .]
"For now, federal law is blind to the wisdom of a future day when the right to use medical marijuana to alleviate excruciating pain may be deemed fundamental," Pregerson wrote.
The most absurd aspect of this case was the earlier ruling by the Supreme Court that even marijuana grown in the back yard for personal medical use somehow affected interstate commerce. And let's not even get into federalism and states being the laboratories of democracy or any of that. This is the drug war, after all.
