OU and Medical Marijuana

You can smoke a cigar when you have a baby. You don’t smoke a casual joint with dinner. You smoke it for one reason, to get high.

cmon man, most people drink alcohol for its inibriating effects. and who cares if there are other kinda ok times to drink if it is a dangerous substance?

answer is that normal people over the legal age are, and can be, responsible to be responsible with their own lives. there are other drugs a person cant be responsible with, like heroin.

the pro pot crowd is made up of unrepentant druggies and people who have never known someone who suffered from the drug and thus are completely clueless.

false and false. cmon neville you really thought so?

why do we think medical marijuana is for pot heads only? is there a law on the books anywhere that it must be prescribed by a tie dyed t shirt wearing hippie listening to bob marley music?

ya, just the way i talk, cmon be a sport. i hear what your saying. it happens to be that for some of these poeple who are suffering, pot is a huge help in the process of fighting. i understand were switching from rec to med but for the med the argument should still hold true.

“Neville, liquor has only one use, getting inebriated.”

Whoa. You are way off base. Apparently you never savored a single malt from the lush valleys of Killarney.

You never languished over the spicy yet substantially mellow bouquet of a 40 year old delicate rye.

Try a Macallan 1946. I think you’ll change your tune.

This really is not so simple. There remains a debate as to whether this issue should be something that is reserved to the states under the tenth amendment. It is true that right now the majority of the Supreme Court in the raich case held that the federal government has the right to regulate pot, but two justices dissented and ultimately, in this country the law emanates from some combination of the three branches which have struggled for power over time.

Several states have chosen to legalize medical marijuana and a few recreational. Two justices on the Supreme Court believe they have the right to do so. The executive branch has explicitly agreed to leave those states alone. And he arguably has the right to do that.

In my view, it is therefore legal in those states that authorize it. It is also true that tomorrow president Cruz or trump or whoever could change Obamas policy on this, or president Clinton could liberalize it, but as of right now, the president has agreed, there is a constitutional argument that the federal law overreaches the state,s sovereignty, so to say it’s illegal under federal law is not exactly right.

Ps. The federal government has been notoriously anti pot. One reason for the current laxity is similar to the Jewish law concept that you don’t make a law the klal won’t comply with. The fact is that there is widespread noncompliance in states where it is still illegal,, it is probably less damaging then alcohol, and if the states are going to permit it, the Feds are going to have a real hard time enforcing without state cooperation.

miamilawyer- many debates exist. The Supreme Court has been the self-proclaimed and only accepted interpreter of the constitution for at least the last 200 years. It has ruled directly on this issue. Raich says drug laws are not a federal overreach of interstate power. Marbury says that federal law as defined by the USSC wins. Debates and your view notwithstanding, marijuana remains entirely illegal under federal law.

@dy – congress may have chosen to “not fund” the prosecution of violators of this law. If Obama were to decide to prosecute, I don’t see how the funding would have any direct bearing on anything but logistics.

@miamilawyer – I’m glad we now agree. Possession of Marijuana is illegal in the USA under the Controlled Substances Act. The odds of facing criminal penalties for violating this federal law in states with legislation which purport to “legalize” it are currently negligible. Things could change in the future.