Angel Raich drops medical pot case

Oakland medical marijuana patient and activist Angel Raich dropped her lawsuit against the federal government Thursday, ending a five-year legal odyssey which had taken her all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"I've lost all faith in the judicial system, I don't understand how somebody can lose their constitutional right to life in this country," she said Thursday. "It's been really, really hard for me these last few months, and I wasn't happy about having to give up the case.

"But I'm really having a hard time medically speaking right now -- my brain tumor has finally started causing damage and I have to start radiation treatment in a couple of weeks at Stanford," she explained, adding she's lost some sensation in the left side of her face, including problems with blinking, chewing and swallowing.

"This is far from over, it's just a new beginning," Raich insisted -- the battle now moves from courts to Congress. "I'm not going to give up."

She said she's talking with lawyers and lawmakers about drafting "a right-to-life, medical necessity sort of bill. ... It's basically going to protect the sickest of the sick, and it's going to be narrow because there are other bills already out there." She's also continuing her work with medical-marijuana advocacy groups, and she'll go to Washington, D.C., later this month on a lobbying trip.

Besides the brain tumor, Raich, a 41-year-old mother of two, suffers from scoliosis, wasting syndrome, fibromyalgia and a host of other ailments.

Raich and Diane Monson of Oroville plus two unnamed providers sued the government in October 2002 to prevent any interference with their medical marijuana use, but this case's seeds actually were sown in the Supreme Court's May 2001 decision on the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative's case.

The court in that earlier case had ruled there's no collective medical necessity exception to the federal ban, which defines marijuana as having no valid medical use. But it didn't rule on constitutional questions underlying the medical marijuana debate, so Raich, Monson and their lawyers tailor-made a case raising exactly those issues.

A federal judge in San Francisco rejected their arguments in March 2003, but a 9th Circuit appeal panel later reversed that ruling, finding the plaintiffs could prevail at trial on their claim that the Constitution's Commerce Clause lets Congress regulate only interstate commerce, and that Californians' medical marijuana use neither crosses state lines nor involves money changing hands.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case in November 2004 and in June 2005 ruled 6-3 to uphold the federal ban, finding that even marijuana grown in back yards for personal medical use can affect or contribute to the illegal interstate market for marijuana and so is within Congress' constitutional reach.

But the 9th Circuit panel and the Supreme Court at that point had dealt only with the Commerce Clause argument, not other constitutional issues. Monson dropped out, but Raich pressed on as the case returned to the 9th Circuit for those other arguments.

Though clearly sympathetic to Raich's medical plight, a three-judge 9th Circuit panel concluded in March that medical necessity doesn't shield medical-marijuana users from federal prosecution, and that medical marijuana use isn't a fundamental right protected by the Constitution's guarantee of due process of law.

Raich could've asked that the March decision be reviewed by a larger, 11-judge 9th Circuit panel; or that it be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court; or that it return to U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins of San Francisco for a few unresolved issues.

But Robert Raich, her ex-husband and one of her attorneys, said Thursday the legal avenues left to them "did not look fruitful. It's a sorry commentary that right now we simply cannot depend on the courts to uphold fundamental rights, even the right to life."

Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., said Congress is where Raich is needed most, as the House this summer probably will take up -- for the fifth consecutive year -- a bill to forbid federal prosecution of patients in the 12 states with medical marijuana-laws.

Last year's vote on the bill by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach, was 259-163 against the amendment. The measure received 161 votes in 2005; 148 in 2004 and 152 in 2003; it would need 218 to pass.

Illegalizing Marijuana for PROFIT

Illegalizing Marijuana for profit boiled down to Hearst & DuPont stuffing politicians pockets. Hemp is a far better quality paper and fiber product. In the early days of our nation, the hemp plant proved a valuable resource for hundreds of years, instrumental in the making of fabric, paper and other necessities. This changed during the Industrial Revolution, which rendered tree-pulp papermaking and synthetic fibers more cost-effective through the rise of assembly line manufacturing methods. A more efficient way of utilizing hemp was a bit slower in coming. It was not until the early 1930's that a new technique for using hemp pulp for papermaking was developed by the Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with the patenting of the hemp decorticator (a machine that revolutionized the harvesting of hemp). These innovations promised to reduce the cost of producing hemp-pulp paper to less than half the cost of tree-pulp paper. Since hemp is an annually renewable source, which requires minimal chemical treatment to process, the advent of hemp pulp paper would allegedly have been better for the environment than the sulfuric acid wood-pulping process. Hemp had many champions, who predicted that its abundance and versatility would soon revitalize the American economy.

William Randolph Hearst, media mogul, billionaire, had different ideas. His aggressive efforts to demonize cannabis were so effective; they continue to color popular opinion today. In the early 1930's, Hearst owned a good deal of timber acreage; one might say that he had the monopoly on this market. The threatened advent of mass hemp production proved a considerable threat to his massive paper-mill holdings -- he stood to lose many, many millions of dollars to the lowly hemp plant. Hearst cleverly utilized his immense national network of newspapers and magazines to spread wildly inaccurate and sensational stories of the evils of cannabis or "marihuana," a phrase brought into the common parlance, in part due to frequent mentions in his publications.

The sheer number of newspapers, tabloids, magazines, and film reels that Hearst controlled enabled him to quickly and to effectively inundate American media with this propaganda. Hearst preyed on existing prejudices by associating cannabis with Mexican workers who threatened to steal American jobs and African-Americans who had long been the subject of white American venom (see accompanying articles). An ironic side-note: much of this racism had already been perpetrated by the propaganda of Hearst, an unabashed racist. The American people had already developed irrational hatred for these racial groups, and so readily accepted the ridiculous stories of their crazed crimes incited by marijuana use.

Hearst was not alone in his scheme to destroy hemp production. The new techniques also made hemp a viable option for fabric and plastics, two areas of manufacturing which together with paper seriously threatened DuPont chemicals, which at this time specialized in the chemical manufacturing of synthetic fiber and plastics, and the process of pulping paper. In fact, Hearst and Lammont DuPont had a multi-million dollar deal in the works for joint papermaking. So these two moguls, together with DuPont's banker, Andrew Mellon, bravely joined forces to stave off the bitter onrush of bankruptcy. They combined Hearst's yellow journalism campaign (so called because the paper developed through his and DuPont's methods aged prematurely) and the appointment of Mellon's nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to Commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in order to successfully stamp out the threat of hemp

Rep. Robert L. Doughton of North Carolina introduced the Act in Congress on April 14, 1937 to criminalize the recreational use of marijuana through prohibitive taxation. The bill was the brainchild of Commissioner Anslinger who later testified before Congress in support of the bill.

Congress held only two hearings, totaling one hour of testimony, to debate the merits of marijuana prohibition. Federal witness Harry Anslinger testified before the House Ways and Means Committee that "this drug is entirely the monster-Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured." He was joined by Assistant General Counsel for the Department of the Treasury, Clinton Hester, who affirmed that the drug's eventual effect on the user "is deadly." These statements summarized the federal government's official position and served as the initial justification for criminalizing marijuana smoking.

The American Medical Association (AMA) represented the lone voice against marijuana prohibition before Congress. AMA Legislative Counsel Dr. William C. Woodward testified, "There is no evidence" that marijuana is a dangerous drug. Woodward challenged the propriety of passing legislation based only on newspaper accounts and questioned why no data from the Bureau of Prisons or the Children's Bureau supported the FBN's position. He further argued that the legislation would severely compromise a physician's ability to utilize marijuana's therapeutic potential. Surprisingly, the committee took little interest in Woodward's testimony and told the physician, "If you want to advise us on legislation, you ought to come here with some constructive proposals ... rather than trying to throw obstacles in the way of something that the federal government is trying to do."

After just one hearing, the Ways and Means Committee approved the "Marihuana Tax Act." The House of Representatives followed suit on August 20 after engaging in only 90 seconds of debate. During this abbreviated floor "discussion," only two questions were asked. First, a member of Congress from upstate New York asked Speaker Sam Rayburn to summarize the purpose of the bill. Rayburn replied, "I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marijuana. I think it is a narcotic of some kind." The same representative then asked, "Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support the bill?" Falsely, a member of the Ways and Means Committee replied, "Their Doctor Wharton (sic) gave this measure his full support ... [as well as] the approval [of] the American Medical Association." Following this brief exchange of inaccurate information, the House approved the federal prohibition of marijuana without a recorded vote.

Doughton's bill sailed though the Senate with the same ease. The Senate held one brief hearing on the bill before overwhelmingly approving the measure. President Franklin Roosevelt promptly signed the legislation into law on August 2, 1937. The "Marihuana Tax Act" took effect on October 1, 1937.

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