Reason Foundation

Angel Raich continues to battle the federal goverment over her right to use medical marijuana and a long list of ailments including an inoperable brain tumor, a uterine fibroid tumor, severe chronic pain from scoliosis, non-epileptic seizures. After the United States Supreme Court ruled the federal government can prosecute medical marijuana users - even in states where medical marijuana is legal - Raich's case returned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Reason Foundation filed a brief in support of Raich, arguing, "In the end, the only federal interest actually at stake is the government’s oddly paternalistic desire to prevent seriously ill patients from taking a drug of last resort simply because the government is not yet convinced that it will help them (i.e., that it has a generally accepted medical use), notwithstanding the well supported contrary experience and views of the patients and their doctors. The notion that the people have to convince the government of the value of nonharmful behavior before the government will permit such behavior is a strange and disturbing basis for government regulation and is squarely at odds with any notion of liberty as conceived by the founding generation.8 And whatever may be the ability of States to adopt such an odd paternalism through their broad police powers, the State of California has made the opposite choice, and federal imposition of such local paternalism contrary to the State’s own local desires, is a far stretch from the concerns that led to the Commerce Clause." The Reason brief is here: