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To: KDD
Raich deals with medical marijuana that does not involve commerce nor interstate movement (and I agree entirely with Thomas's dissent here, and think pot should be either legalized or decriminalized).

However, opiates largely require importation and processing, and meth requires manufacture with a wide range of chemicals, and both would be well outside the scope of Thomas's dissent in Raich, IMO.

83 posted on 04/04/2010 8:06:39 AM PDT by dirtboy
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To: dirtboy
The only way the drug war is profitable to the government is through making cannibus illegal. There are less then 250,000 opiate addicts in this country...compared to 30-40 million Americans who have admitted to smoking grass. The drug war is a war on a weed...a subsidy to cops and a tool of control for government.
90 posted on 04/04/2010 8:17:03 AM PDT by KDD (When the government boot is on your neck, it matters not whether it is the right boot or the left.)
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To: dirtboy
However, opiates largely require importation and processing, and meth requires manufacture with a wide range of chemicals, and both would be well outside the scope of Thomas's dissent in Raich, IMO.

From Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution

"But the question is a very different one, whether, under pretence of an exercise of the power to regulate commerce, congress may in fact impose duties for objects wholly distinct from commerce. The question comes to this, whether a power, exclusively for the regulation of commerce, is a power for the regulation of manufactures? The statement of such a question would seem to involve its own answer. Can a power, granted for one purpose, be transferred to another? If it can, where is the limitation in the constitution? Are not commerce and manufactures as distinct, as commerce and agriculture? If they are, how can a power to regulate one arise from a power to regulate the other? It is true, that commerce and manufactures are, or may be, intimately connected with each other. A regulation of one may injuriously or beneficially affect the other. But that is not the point in controversy. It is, whether congress has a right to regulate that, which is not committed to it, under a power, which is committed to it, simply because there is, or may be an intimate connexion between the powers. If this were admitted, the enumeration of the powers of congress would be wholly unnecessary and nugatory. Agriculture, colonies, capital, machinery, the wages of labour, the profits of stock, the rents of land, the punctual performance of contracts, and the diffusion of knowledge would all be within the scope of the power; for all of them bear an intimate relation to commerce. The result would be, that the powers of congress would embrace the widest extent of legislative functions, to the utter demolition of all constitutional boundaries between the state and national governments. "

Importation of opiates does justify federal government intervention at the border, but justification based on claims of "manufacture" ring hollow.

97 posted on 04/04/2010 8:22:30 AM PDT by tacticalogic ("Oh bother!" said Pooh, as he chambered his last round.)
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