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I've been wondering that too.

Is it possible, that maybe... it has something to do with the states which haven't "legalized" """MEDICINAL""" pot? And how the interstate commerce laws MIGHT be a problem? Do you think.. the States, themselves, which have legalized pot should erect a border control between states which haven't legalized pot -- to prevent the "carrying out of a legal state" into an "unlegalized state" pot?

Just batting ideas here with you.

Interesting idea, but not a very good one.

Anyone can carry a licensed gun into a city with strict gun regulations. Does that possibility, the possibility that someone might cross state lines and thereby be in violation of another jurisdiction's local laws, mean that no state has the right to issue carry permits?

Let the states each set their own policy. If someone comes into their state and breaks the local laws, what's the problem with simply letting the state prosecute them under their laws?

If we twist the definition enough, anything and everything can be construed as "interstate commerce" and therefore subject to federal control. If that's the case, why bother having state governments at all?

You've touched on the nub of the problem with your post. It is that when powerful and heavily populated California opens a loophole to legitimize marijuana, the effects will be necessarily felt far beyond its borders. My state is near California, but is socially conservative. The people in my state, the vast majority of them, do not want the California drug culture to take root here. That's what will happen if the medicinal marijuana loophole is opened.

Thomas's dissent focuses narrowly on a "poor woman" who supposedly is in desperate straits and needs to smoke a joint every two hours to keep her back pain at bay. "All she is doing is growing a few sprigs of marijuana in a windowsill box for her own health needs. How can that possibly affect other states under the commerce clause? " he asks.

Scalia, more realistically, looks beyond the poor suffering woman, her back pain, and window sill weed patch and sees five hundred thousand enterprising California pot heads and their physician accomplices quietly stockpiling marijuana seeds, writing prescriptions, and cultivating tens of thousands of prime land in anticipation of growing thousands of tons of "legal" medicinal marijuana to shove through the loophole in ten thousand different creative ways.

The stuff WILL be sold and distributed outside the state. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in fantasyland. California's "benevolent" legislation will become my state's curse.