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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.

California's "benevolent" legislation will become my state's curse.

You may be correct, however as the Constitution was written THAT IS NOT A POWER GIVEN TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!

Beside are California's alcohol laws, not mention Nevada's which is closer and more has even less regulation, any more of a threat to the peace and well being of Utah? Not only that, if pot is such a threat then Utah can set up checkpoints on I-80 at Eastline to check for it just like California checks for agricultural pests.

Why does it bother you so if someone you don't know uses drugs? If you want to control the dangerous side effects associated with drug use, namely, the crime that often accompanies such usage, then, by all means, criminalize the crimes that have actual victims. If someone commits a personal crime while under the influence of a drug, double, or triple the regular punishment. But why is it a crime simply to grow a plant? Or to simply possess a plant? Or to ingest a plant? Is that really a power you feel comfortable surrendering to the federal government?

You see it too. Please see mine, #46, in this thread.

I do firmly believe in the "privacy" of the home issue; am against the overreaching intrusion of government. But I recognize I don't live on an island. I share my "living quarters" with fellow citizens of a state; but also my neighbors in the other states.

Long ago when the pro-legalize pot issue came up, I thought about it quite a bit in re its effects. Take a suburban "tract home" location. Sure, "growing it in the backyard" sounds simple enough; but how simple is it when a child ingests it? Sure, the child (and family) could get hammered on grounds of "invading private property" but what if that property is held by Feds through loan?

And often, there is an "element" of people who pervade a pot house locale. Will it bring down property values? etc. etc. etc.

On one hand, this all sounds like a bunch of handwringing by a bunch of worry-worts. OTOH, it sounds like a "my pot, my life, butt out" from pro-legalizers.

But, the bottom line is, IMHO, to hammer out these issues in advance. At least, this is what should and usually does constitute a civil society. And if so hammered, facilitates the process of fewer lawyers entering the scene to hammer non-legalizers and pro-legalizers, alike.

I don't know about that. I don't see how some tiny small scale little growing operations would have any appreciable effect on neighboring states. Marijuana is already cheap and plentiful everywhere, but especially in that part of the country. If you live in Arizona, New Mexico, or California, your state is already a major drug trafficking state where huge loads from Mexico are dropped off to be broken down and delivered to other states out east. These aren't little operations supplied by a few plants like most medical marijuana grows, we are talking about millions of pounds of marijuana being run through those states every year. A few small medical marijuana grows and cooperatives together supplying a few thousand people out of the millions in that part of the country who smoke marijuana isn't going to make any difference. It would make even less of a difference if the feds didn't discourage the states from monitoring this activity, which is exactly what is happening now. States don't want a lot of records kept because they don't want to aid the feds in prosecuting people doing something legal under state law.

I just noticed you live in Utah. According to the last government study on drug use broken down state by state, Utah has the lowest marijuana use rate in the nation with only 4% of persons twelve and older reporting past month marijuana use on the 2003 survey. You worry about California, but use their was only at 6.5% compared to the national average of 6.18% and the only reason it was higher than the national average is because people 26 and older there are a little more likely to smoke it than the national average for people in that age group. People twenty five and younger in California believe it or not smoked marijuana at a rate below the national average for people of the same ages. You should worry more about your neighbors in Colorado where 8.49% of those 12 and older report past month use, or Nevada where 7.62% report past month use. Their "drug cultures" appear to be a little more pronounced than California's and they are your neighbors. And of course you have those neighbors directly below you in Arizona who are storing tons and tons and tons of marijuana in safe houses ready to be transported to the rest of America, with more coming in from Mexico everyday.

http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k3State/appB.htm#tabB.3