Few people who graduate from government run (so-called) “education” system know that public police are a relatively recent invention almost unknown to the authors of the Bill of Rights. We are now getting to see yet more reasons why their powers must be constrained, lest more innocent lives are snuffed out in the name of protecting the public.
Worse, the flip side of making historically legal plants illegal is the widespread compromises of the law enforcement community and system. It must be happening, given the vast ocean of drugs flowing into the country, yet how little gets intercepted.
(Now, I feel almost silly using the phrase “historically legal”, but I do it for the sake of readers who carelessly assume that today’s Welfare-Warfare State is the way it was when the Bill of Rights was ratified. In that era, government did not dream of regulating plants, other than a short-lived attempt to tax the booze distilled from corn. IOW, up until the lifetime of my grandfather, government did not think it had the power to regulate plants and chemicals, let alone think that citizens would allow it to assume that power. Today’s compliance-oriented citizen is woefully ignorant of how liberty-oriented citizens used to be.)
In 1807, Thomas Jefferson prohibited trade with Europe using the power of the Commerce Clause. He also prohibited alcohol sales to the Indians in 1805. (James Madison, who wrote the Commerce Clause, was his Secretary of State.)
In 1842, Congress forbade the importation of obscene literature or pictures from abroad. In 1884, the exportation or shipment in interstate commerce of livestock having any infectious disease was forbidden.
''The power to regulate commerce among the several States is granted to Congress in terms as absolute as is the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations.''
-- Brown v. Houston, 114 U.S. 622 (1885)