So what the heck is the federal law on marijuana, and other controlled substances, all about?
If marijuana is banned or illegal or controlled under federal law, is such law constitutional and enforceable in the first place? If states are free to legalize marijuana on their own?
Can the federal law on marijuana even be enforced in states which have legalized it?
To me, this opens up a big issue of federal vs. state laws and regulations and enforcement, apart from the specific issue of marijuana itself.
Could this whole issue go into court? Recall how the courts decided we must have homosexual marriage nationwide, and that the states have ultimate authority over defining marriage, and presumeably, over family law in general.
We need a few more replaced Supreme Court Justices first and then this whole mess of Federal Overreach/States Rights can be addressed.
We need to tread water for a couple years in this very imperfect state of affairs.
What, you may ask, led the Justices to such an awful result? A New Deal decision holding that a farmer who grew wheat on his own land for his personal use was nevertheless in "interstate commerce" and subject to New Deal crop regulations.
That made sense to the liberals and Kennedy, no surprise, but sadly, Scalia departed from his textualism and concurred.