Thanks. What a boondoggle.
Seems to me that he’s saying that it would be too easy for a home grower in CA to ultimately end up in the hands of somebody outside of CA. Somebody outside of CA could grow the crop in CA and then take it to the state where they live and sell it there. Because growing it isn’t illegal in CA, taking it across state lines wouldn’t be illegal because that isn’t a commercial activity, and selling it in a single state wouldn’t be federally-regulated because it is intrastate and not interstate.... allowing people to grow marijuana in CA could allow the interstate production and sale of marijuana that technically didn’t break any laws because the growing was done in a different state than the selling.
But that doesn’t make sense to me either, because selling drugs is illegal regardless of where the drugs were produced. Right? They use the commerce clause to justify forbidding the sale of it but it’s illegal to sell it even if state lines aren’t crossed. Right?
None of this makes any sense to me.
Nor to many of us. As I understand Scalia's reasoning, he says: Congress banned interstate sales of marijuana; if I can legally grow marijuana in California, I could easily take it to Nevada and sell it; the only way the feds could prevent that is to stop every car leaving California and search it, which is impossible; so, in order to make Congress's ban on interstate sales effective, Congress can ban possession of marijuana by anyone everywhere.
That reasoning is strained, to say the least.
As a matter of history, Congress didn't start by banning interstate shipments of marijuana. They started by imposing a prohibitive tax on marijuana. When that was perceived as ineffective, Congress simply banned all possession of marijuana. If you go back and read federal court cases from the 1950s and 60s, they don't rely on interstate commerce; they say that it is impossible to grow marijuana in the U.S. (!) so the ban on possession is a way to enforce Congress's control over the borders (!) by making effective the ban on importing marijuana.
That same reasoning applies to homemade machine guns (see the Stewart case above) and to guns made and sold in Kansas. It's a package deal.
But that doesn’t make sense to me either, because selling drugs is illegal regardless of where the drugs were produced. Right?
They use the commerce clause to justify forbidding the sale of it but it’s illegal to sell it even if state lines aren’t crossed. Right?
Not in CO and WA, or in states with medical marijuana. Let me ask this. Do you support the authority of CO and WA to run their marijuana policies without fedgov overruling them?