TIME Magazine Archive Article — Lessons of the Schiavo Battle — Apr. 04, 2005: Pat Robertson called the removal of her feeding tube ‘ judicial murder,’ and House majority leader Tom DeLay described it as an ‘ act of medical terrorism.’ Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of only five House Republicans to vote against Congress’s emergency legislation throwing the Terri Schiavo case into the federal courts, declared that ‘ this Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy.’
OK, I know, enough about Schiavo already, that’s soooo last week.
But I began to think about this in the light of the forthcoming US Supreme Court decision in Raich v. Ashcroft. Angel Raich is a medical marijuana patient in California. She suffers from various maladies, including inoperable brain tumor, life-threatening wasting syndrome, chronic pain disorders, seizure disorder, nausea, scoliosis, TMJ, endometriosis, uterine tumor, and many other documented medical conditions. Her doctor prescribed cannabis to alleviate many of her conditions, as she cannot find relief from most prescription medications (she is violently allergic). Without marijuana, she will likely die.
The Raich case comes from the DEA raiding medical cannabis co-ops in California, co-ops that were operating completely aboveboard and in accordance with California law. The DEA claims authority to bust co-ops because pot is still against federal law, and the DEA’s authority is largely derived from the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which states that the feds can regulate commercial activity between the states. Raich’s argument is that 1) medipot is legal in California, 2) it is grown wholly in California, and 3) there is no commerce involved.
So I wonder, if we are, as President Bush says, to “err on the side of life”, how does that jibe with the DEA’s continued War on Medical Marijuana patients? How can the federal government go to the extreme measure of writing a law to prevent the denial of a life-sustaining feeding tube, while persecuting another woman in order to deny a life-sustaining medical treatment? If we “err on the side of life”, shouldn’t that also apply to Angel Raich and thousands of others who require marijuana to live?
