Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

choice and treats us like morons. In addition, it absolutely will not work to decrease teenage smoking or smoking-related deaths. The folks at the FDA must realize this fact; if they don’t, they might be more dim-witted than we originally thought. Advertising is at the core of the tobacco industry’s success. The industry revolves around recruiting new smokers. We’re dealing with an industry that has succeeded despite the fact that its products slowly kill people! Banning flavored cigarettes doesn’t put a dent in big tobacco’s armor; rather, it’s just another challenge. Should the government ban tobacco advertising? Ban tobacco? Or just stay out and let people make free choices?

Criminalizing Marijuana

Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, cultivated hemp, the plant from which marijuana is derived.8 In the late eighteenth century, many medical journals recommended the use of hemp seeds and roots for treating sexually transmitted diseases, inflamed skin, and incontinence.9 Unfortunately, a change in our attitude toward drugs came in the nineteenth century, when a noticeable number of Americans became unknowingly addicted to morphine.

Although there was an attitude of concern about drug use, it took some time for the country to criminalize it. By 1937, marijuana was outlawed in twenty-three states, mostly in an effort to stop former morphine addicts from starting to use a new drug or as a backlash against newly arrived Mexican immigrants who sometimes brought the drug to the United States with them.10 On October 1st 1937, under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Marijuana Tax Act went into effect, which imposed a prohibitive tax on the “evil” drug. Congress held just two hearings on the law, which was introduced by Rep. Robert L. Doughton of North Carolina. Harry Anslinger, arguing for the tax, stated to the House Ways and Means Committee that “traffic in marijuana is increasing to such an extent that it has come to be the cause for the greatest national concern. . . . This drug is entirely the monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured.”

In addition, two veterinarians testified that dogs (not people, but dogs) do not respond well to marijuana. One of the vets stated, “Over a period of six months or a year (of exposure to marijuana) . . . the animal must be discarded because it is no longer serviceable.” The testimony for the tax, as you may have concluded, was far from convincing. Furthermore, the committee rejected testimony from the American Medical Association, which pointed out the government’s lack of evidence of harm to humans.

Just three months after Representative Doughton introduced the bill, in June 1937, the House passed it. One congressman commented on the bill, stating that it had “something to do with something that is called marijuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.”11 In 1970, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, a comprehensive law regulating a myriad of controlled substances. It banned all marijuana outright.

In addition to prohibiting drugs for recreational use, the government has also criminalized the use of marijuana for medical use. In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court decided that Angel Raich and Diane Monson could not use physician-prescribed medical marijuana to relieve their serious medical conditions. Raich and Monson had relied on cannabis treatments for many years. In fact, Raich’s physician believed that ending such treatments “would certainly cause Raich excruciating pain and could very well prove fatal.”12 Nevertheless, federal agents entered Monson’s house to take and destroy her six marijuana plants, despite the fact that both women were residents of California, which has authorized the use of medical marijuana since 1996. California law arguably conflicts with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the federal law that makes the “manufacture, distribution, and possession of marijuana” illegal, and makes no exception for medical use.

In a downright bizarre majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court held, 6 to 3, that the Commerce Clause (which was written to authorize Congress to keep commerce between the states regular, not to prohibit it) permits Congress to control marijuana, a substance that cannot legally enter the stream of commerce. In ruling for the government, the majority likened this case to the ridiculous case of Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Court concluded that the federal government could regulate the wheat a farmer grows for personal use. Raich does the seemingly impossible, as it extends the Court’s decision in Wickard and wins the award for the most ludicrous adaptation of the Commerce Clause in American history. The Court stated that not only can the government regulate items harvested for personal use (the marijuana grown in Raich and the wheat grown in Wickard); it can regulate, through its power to control interstate commerce, something that can’t even legally be bought or sold!

Unfortunately, the Commerce Clause has become the tool through which Congress wields virtually unlimited power. Based on Supreme Court precedent, the Court in Raich stated that the Commerce Clause permits Congress to regulate activities that “substantially affect interstate commerce.” Furthermore, as the Court puts it, Congress need not “legislate with scientific exactitude,”13 nor make any kind of particularized findings supporting its conclusions. The idea that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Raich’s medical marijuana would find itself in the stream of commerce was good enough for the Supreme Court to side with the government, as if women growing small amounts of marijuana in their own home for their own medical use ever have a chance of affecting commerce whatsoever.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent made sense. According to Justice Thomas:

Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers . . . By holding that Congress may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor