Our view: Supreme Court ruling should prompt Congress to change drug laws

The Bush administration got the ruling it wanted Monday to properly punish people it considers dangerous lawbreakers: ailing patients who use state-approved marijuana to relieve their painful symptoms. We hope the federal government heeds common sense and the will of majorities in 10 states and opts not to crack down on medical-marijuana users. Don't they have anything better to do?

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Monday marked an important new chapter in the legal struggle over medical marijuana. The court reaffirmed the federal government's right to punish pot users under the Controlled Substances Act. On a 6-3 decision, the justices overturned a federal appeals court decision in December that had allowed states to continue their voter-approved medical-marijuana programs.

Ten states, including California with 1996's Prop. 215, have passed legislation that let doctors prescribe marijuana for treatment of illnesses including AIDS, cancer and glaucoma. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in December that so long as the weed wasn't sold, transported across state lines or used for nonmedicinal purposes, states could adopt and enforce their own medical marijuana laws.

At the center of this debate are people like Angel Raich and Diane Monson, a pair of Northern California women on the losing side of Monday's decision who both suffer from a variety of painful illnesses. Raich and Monson sued then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002 seeking a court order to let them smoke their own homegrown marijuana. They sued after a series of high-profile raids of cannabis clubs, including several in the San Francisco Bay Area, shuttered Raich's Oakland supplier and forced many clubs underground, despite the state's official approval. Those raids were Ashcroft's response to a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sick people were not excluded from federal drug laws.

With so many actual security threats at home and abroad, the federal government has opted time and again to concentrate some of its vast resources on forcing seriously ill people onto the streets in search of medicine. It is just this kind of waste of time and effort that gives government a bad name and compounds the suffering of the most afflicted among us.

Now that the court has reasserted federal control, it's up to Congress to halt the overzealous pot prosecutions of doctors and patients who use marijuana as medicine with their state's approval.

They may soon get their chance: the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on bipartisan legislation next week that would protect state-approved users of medical marijuana.