- US District Court
- Could it end here?
When democracy fails, turn to the courtroom.
Wingnuts love to decry “activist judges” making progress from the bench, but let’s look at the scorecard: In the courtroom, gay marriage bans can be overturned, as can race-based segregation.
The same might be happening with the war on marijuana at this very moment.
Yesterday was the third day of testimony in a hearing wherein a federal judge in Sacramento is listening to arguments as to whether the federal government’s classification of cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance — the list of the most dangerous, least useful drugs known to science — is constitutional.
Determining whether declaring cannabis highly addictive and medically useless violates the Constitution is a thorny question. It’s obvious to anyone who bothers to read the data that it’s scientifically unsound.
The case, in the Eastern District of California in Sacramento, is U.S. vs. Schweder. At first blush, it’s not very sympathy-inducing: the defendants indicted are 16 growers suspected of cultivating over 1,800 plants on public land in the Shasta-Trinity National forest, as our friends at Smell The Truth point out.
The reason why the case is historic is that the judge, U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, is actually letting witnesses testify as to why marijuana’s federal classification makes no sense. In federal court, no less, where defendants have famously been denied medical defenses.
Superstar scientist Dr. Carl T. Hart of Columbia University testified on Monday, reported The Leaf Online, which has been covering the trial. Hart, a groundbreaking researcher into addiction science who posits that crack is not the highly addictive substance we thought it was, ran through the basics on marijuana: it has proven medical benefits through research, it had addiction rates lower than other drugs placed lower on the panoply of banned substances.
In other words, keeping it Schedule I makes no sense at all from a data-driven standpoint.
“It’s not my opinion,” Hart said, according to The Leaf. “It’s what the evidence indicates.”
Meanwhile, the United States government is using your tax dollars to try to make a case that marijuana is basically the same thing as heroin — the kind of drug that kills 22,000 Americans a year, as STT pointed noted, and inspires movies such as Requiem for a Dream.
Change is already happening in the courts. A federal appeals court recently noted in a ruling that imprisonment might not be an “appropriate” penalty for using cannabis.
This trial won’t undo the War on Drugs, of course. Nor will it undo the feds’ silly classification of cannabis. It could, however, provide precedent for both. At the least, it’s showing just how silly this charade is at its core.
But of course, most of us already knew that.
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Could A Judge In Sacramento Undo Feds' War on Marijuana?
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